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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Fwd: Re: Maintainer of KLaptop?
From:       "Chris Howells" <howells () kde ! org>
Date:       2004-12-31 8:28:47
Message-ID: 200412310828.54522.howells () kde ! org
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On Thursday 30 December 2004 21:06, Paul Campbell wrote:
> months (moving my family between countries, travelling the world etc) I'm
> now back on line and working thru getting a working tip of tree build I can
> fix bugs on

KLaptopDaemon was good a few years ago but it has unfortunately been fairly 
unloved whilst both laptop and desktop technology have moved on. As such, it 
makes a variety of assumptions -- which are fairly deeply embedded in the 
code -- that are no longer correct about modern hardware.

* Sleep and suspend nowadays are absolutely not laptop specific, and only 
supporting them in a laptop-specific application is wrong
* CPU throttling is not laptop specific, and is wrong for the same reason
* The KLaptopDaemon source code is very complex and is fairly unmaintainable 
in it current state. On Linux there is special support for Sony VAIO, IBM 
ThinkPad, Toshiba something-or-other and PCMCIA. The battery monitoring 
component provides support for PowerMacs, FreeBSD and NetBSD.

But what happens if I want to use the special features of ThinkPad's or ASUS 
laptops on another OS? It turns into even more of a spaghetti mess.


Being generally dis-satisfied with the laptop support in KDE, and bearing 
these things on mind, I have been revamping the laptop/power saving support 
in KDE.

The first step has been to write a laptop battery monitoring component, which 
monitors the battery, and ONLY monitors the battery. It has a clean C++ 
plugin architecture and current the Linux ACPI, Linux APM, Linux PowerMac and 
FreeBSD plugins are working nicely (FreeBSD even supports multiple batteries 
now ;)). All that is needed for the app to be finished is to debug the NetBSD 
plugin which should take a matter of minutes once I get NetBSD installed.

All laptop-model specific stuff such as that for ThinkPad's and VAIOs should 
be a KMilo module. And indeed, there are already KMilo plugins for ThinkPad's 
and VAIOs so this part of KLaptopDaemon is redundant.

I am also going to write an application which provides sleep and CPU 
throttling support. I haven't quite decided the exact plans for this but it 
will integrate nicely with ksmserver.

My aim, and it is on the feature plan, is to get these into KDE shortly, sadly 
unlikely before 3.4, but certainly before 4.0. Basically I need to do a tiny 
bit more work on the NetBSD KBatteryMonitor plugin, and then write this 
sleep/CPU throttling app.

KBatteryMonitir is in kdenonbeta/kbatterymonitor.

-- 
Cheers, Chris Howells -- chris@chrishowells.co.uk, howells@kde.org
Web: http://chrishowells.co.uk, PGP ID: 0x33795A2C
KDE/Qt/C++/PHP Developer: http://www.kde.org

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