GNOME Power Manager

GNOME Power Manager is a session daemon for the GNOME desktop environment that makes it easy to manage your laptop or desktop system.

These pages are meant to help you find information about GNOME Power Manager.

GNOME Power Manager is written in C, and has additional dependencies of:

hal 0.5.7
dbus 0.61
libnotify 0.4.2 [optional]

Why is this important

Depending if you are running a PPC or i386 PC the different power management facilities are vastly different. To get your machine to suspend on lid press is already possible, but is difficult to know what config files to modify. To get your LCD screen brightness set to 50% when you remove the AC Adapter of your laptop is probably possible with a clever little Perl script, but is not something that comes ready configured on a standard Linux distro. Any of these things need the user to become the super-user to do the action.

This needs to change before Linux is accepted as a contender for the desktop.

Power Management Introduction

Power management is an essential job on portable computers, and becoming more important on todays high-powered desktops. It uses many complex (and sometimes experimental) parts of the system - each of which are slightly different, and may contain errata to work around. The power management policy could be influenced and tweaked by an huge number of options, and each new laptop model brings more possibilities and options. This should all work in the background without even being noticed by the user.

For example modern machines allow a many options to reduce power consumption:

Reduce CPU frequency
Switch off the harddrive if not needed
Dim the display when the machine is idle
Tweak the memory management to allow longer cache-intervals for the hard drive

And they support various actions to match users needs:

Suspend to RAM
Suspend to Disk (Hibernate)
Shutdown
Blank screen

GNOME Power Manager is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).