From kde-devel  Sun Dec 26 01:46:01 1999
From: Alex Zepeda <jazepeda () pacbell ! net>
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 1999 01:46:01 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: Adding laptop support to KDE2 ....
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=94617285707765

On Wed, 22 Dec 1999, taniwha wrote:

> For a non-laptop system these would still appear (to my knowledge
> kcontrol doesn't provide a way for a panel to signal that it's not
> appropriate for it to be displayed in the current system) but would
> simply contain a message explaining that the power management
> functionality is not present in the current system.

You mean for a system without power control, no?

My Micron supports ACPI rather well, as well as APM 1.2, so some of the
nifty stuff like soft power are quite applicable to me.

> The Linux power management stuff requires privilege to
> do suspend and resumes - none of my KDE code runs privileged
> instead it encourages the user to make the standard apm
> utilities setuid root, checks their protections and if they
> are OK execs them directly (so no setuid kde programs)

The way this works on FreeBSD, apm can be frobbed by a program apm(1),
which can gather info about APM and suspend the machine, etc.  Visit
www.freebsd.og/cgi/man.cgi for the man page.  Anyways, all that's required
is write access to the apm device.  'Course to actually shut down the
system, you'd need access to shutdown (and when passed the -p switch, the
power is turned off if you've got a box that supports APM 1.2).

P.S.  You can coax yourself into writing a BSD port, after all FreeBSD is
well, free :)

- alex

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