New F11 for XO-1.5 build 48

[Paul Fox]

chris wrote:
 > Hi,
 > 
 >    > The advantages in terms of energy use must surely be tiny given
 >    > that we're talking about 5sec of reducing consumption by maybe
 >    > 0.5W.  On the other hand turning off the backlight completely
 >    > after a certain amount of time as a first measure to reduce power
 >    > consumption strikes me as an interesting alternative to the
 >    > current implementation...
 > 
 > We'll do both -- dim the backlight and suspend, and set an alarm for a
 > wakeup to turn off the screen altogether a few minutes later.  The
 > reason for leaving the backlight dimmed for a few minutes is that it
 > might be possible for you to continue to read the web or book page
 > that you're looking at while it's dimmed and we're saving the big
 > watts.

clearly we'll know more as we all use it more.  i currently find
the 20 second timeout much too short -- it's far too likely that
i'll still be looking at the screen.

 > 
 > Dimming the screen when idle is extremely common for laptops; OS X
 > and gnome-power-manager do it too, so I don't think it's too much of
 > a distraction.  With the new versions of OHM, I do the dimming as a
 > fade rather than an atomic change, so that should help it be less
 > distracting too.  (If it still feels distracting, I could make the
 > fade take a little longer?  It takes around 150ms right now.)

i also find the fade-up to be more distracting than the
fade-down.  and i think it makes the resume appear to take longer
than it really does.  (i tried the fade-up in powerd, and
switched to instant-on pretty quickly.)

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org