Hello people, long time no blog.

I have a lot of interesting news for you, I will write a couple of posts in the next days about them. Today I just wanted to give out a small quick update on Power Management, following the drill of Sebastian

So, for the next 2 weeks (and given the freeze time) I happily try to declare and organize the Power Management bug weeks! 2 weeks in which I will dedicate to clear out the list of bugs in Powerdevil and Solid::PowerManagement. Of course I will need your help. It would be nice to have a “central” day, like a small powermanagement bug day in the middle of that. Since I never did such a thing, it would be nice to have some info/help from our bugsquad.

In the meanwhile, if you feel like closing some duplicates, reproducing and providing more information on existing bugs, it would be an extremely valuable help.

More news on completely different stuff coming up soon, stay tuned

Long time no see, again a post on PowerDevil.

PowerDevil has proven to be quite a solid software, and I’m both proud and happy about it: the 4.2->4.3 transition has happened almost with no maintainance (apart from a critical bugfix from Jacopo, thanks!). The proportion of bugs affecting it regard 20% up/downstream problems, 25% “please implement the feature x” and 15% “oh, the GUI sucks and looks confusing” (yeah, percentages are not accurate, I can tell)

The problem is that PowerDevil GUI does suck, big time, because it’s way too cluttered. However, I can’t add cool and nice features without cluttering it even more. Result, there has to be something wrong. The topic came back today by chance in a short conversation with Martin, and while I was eating, suddenly (and by chance, I was not even thinking about it) I got struck by an idea.

Let’s start knowing that Power Management is something that is very much linked to the hardware, and the average user should have a minor part in configuring/dealing with it.

Today, power management systems are based on profiles, more or less configurable. They offer the user access to a set of things to configure, and that’s it. There are some problems, though.

• The options are limited. Some features will still be missing
• The options can’t be expanded: code gets fat, GUI gets unusable
• Everyone loses on the long run: developers have a dirty code base, users have limited possibilities and/or an unusable GUI, distribution don’t have much flexibility in providing custom and effective settings, hardware vendors even less.

To me, this means one thing: the current profile concept fails. That’s why I thought about an alternative: putting an additional layer of abstraction: let’s call it “Actions”.

Actions are containers of, well, actions such as setting CPU scaling, brightness, and anything you can configure with PowerDevil right now. They come in form of plugins (KPlugin ftw!), so that you can create custom Actions (mind the capital letter) by defining your very own set of actions. But let’s make an example, to make things clearer.

You create a new Action, name it “Set Powersaving mode”. In it, you define (using the available plugins), that the scaling should be ondemand, the brightness 10%, the power scheme “powersaving”. That’s it. In the profile chooser, you now have a similar situation: a single page that has some per-event based fields: for example, “When PC is idle for more than 15 minutes, do”. Now what do you do? Just set an Action, in this case “Set Powersaving Mode”.

Everyone wins. Still can’t see why? I’ll tell you:

• Average users: they have to do almost no configuration, and they have it in a very readable form (as Actions can have human readable names, such as “Set Powersaving mode”), and with the best combination in the Actions, that were defined by KDE team, or by the Distro (better), or by the hardware manifacturer (even better)
• Power user: you finally can do the f**k you want with no limits, and I think that’s enough. And the GUI would be damn clean.
• Distributions: you have a way to define your very own actions based on your specific configuration, in a truly easy way, providing your users the best defaults possible
• Hardware vendors, and netbook vendors, I’m mainly looking at you: suppose your new motherboard has a “WOWSAVEALOTOFPOWER” feature, that can be used only on your motherboard by calling some weird functions. Pretty fine. Go ahead, and write 100 line of code to add a new plugin to PowerDevil’s Action system, to let Powerdevil handle it. Netbook vendors shipping KDE can also include it in their default Actions, to give their users the very best.

Looks cool? Obviously, we still miss one step, the configuration of events. I mean, leaving “When the pc is idle for … minutes” gets you limited and hardcoded. So simple, let’s apply the same concept to events too. A profile configuration GUI would look like this (squallid, more conceptual than anything else mockup):

That’s the concept. Slick, huh?

Well, even if it’s a fast and quick mockup, I think you will agree with me that it already looks much more polished than the current one And as you can see, adding a new event is very, very easy and human-readable. I also have a mockup for the Action editor:

Even more slick!

That’s it, the Events one would be analogue to the action one. As you can see, both GUIs need some love, but have a very simple and powerful concept behind. What’s more, is that this way we are getting even closer to Power Management integration in the system: all application would be able to define their own events/actions, allowing, for example, to stop your music when you enter deep powersaving mode, or anything you can think of.

Now, I’ve been eloquent enough, and now I would like to grab opinion and ideas. Do you like it? Would you like to see it in 4.4? Do you think it’s a major improvement and/or sucks? Let’s gather some ideas so that I know where to work on

Hey people, long time no see. I figured out you might want to have a quick overview of what I’m doing these days (for those who care)

Surely I miss something, I’ll write a side post on what’s up in my life currently for those who care, since I don’t like cluttering up Planet KDE with some personal/tedious/useless stuff.

Keep your eyes open, it’s still a long road towards KDE 4.3, and the fun has just begun.

Hello everyone!

Sorry for not posting that much in the last period, but surely I’m not dead and always working. So, since time is always against us, I will post a catchup of things that matter/could matter to you.

- I moved Policykit-KDE to extragear/base. It will be in trunk from 4.3 on, though all distributions that want/need to package it can find it there. I can also set up a set of releases (just like I did with PowerDevil for KDE 4.1) if there is enough demand, so please let me know.

- Chakra got released. It is such a satisfaction, after months of work, to get such a great feedback. Thanks to everyone for their support.

- I moved my first steps with the Wicd solid engine. Now it does something – not that much, and not connecting – though it is definitely starting to work. A big thanks to Wicd developers for being very responsive and helpful, you guys rock. The code is here: http://github.com/drf/wicd-solid/tree/master

- If you can make some noise for Alessandro and recompile DeviceSync from playground you’ll see a brand new delegate for connected devices. Not only: I have added support for custom actions for plugins. You can already change name to your Mtp device and format it. KIO slave coming soon.

- [Developers only]I need some help with a bug with new Plasma notifications. Basically, when calling KNotification::event(), some parameters are just lost, making notifications non persistant, actions ignored and more. This affects PowerDevil wait before suspend functionality, making it simply non work. Any ideas?

- I have discovered KMess, and it seems exactly what I was looking for. I’ll surely help them out.

Well, I hope I have not forgotten anything. Ah yes: I hope you are having some great holidays, just like me, and be excited, because KDE 4.2 is going to rock your socks off

The other day I got a bit fed up of having a “Starting Akonadi server” dialog showing up each time I logged on my KDE4 trunk session, so I decided to investigate what was causing this dialog to appear.

It turned out it was triggered by KRunner. In case you don’t know what KRunner is, it’s the cute little window which comes up when you press Alt+F2.

How can such an innocent window start an Akonadi server? The answer is: KRunner is much more powerful than it looks . Notice the little wrench button on the left of the window? This is were the power is hidden. If you
click on it, you will be greeted with a configuration dialog like this:

If you are in the same situation as me when I opened this dialog for the first time, then all “Features” are likely to be checked. The responsible for the Akonadi start up, is the “Contacts” feature. Uncheck it and enjoy a faster login!

More goodness

While we are here, let’s explore this dialog a bit more. There are quite a few interesting features waiting to be discovered.

Calculator

Need to crunch a few numbers, this is probably the fastest way to do it. Enter ‘=’ and type your operation, Calculator will display the results as you type:

Do not forget the leading ‘=’, otherwise it won’t work.

Powerdevil

The Powerdevil feature is neat too: it makes it easy to suspend your computer from the keyboard. Start typing “suspend” and then select in the list on the bottom the suspend mode you wish to enter.

Nitpick: This feature should provide different icons for the different suspend modes. Right now the only way to know which is which is to select one and look up its title below the text entry.

Command Line

Command line is the most common feature, it starts your programs. If you want a light KRunner, you can uncheck all features but this one. You will still be able to start programs, the only thing you will miss is the application icon
and description.

Nitpick: This feature lets you select a few options from its configuration dialog, such as “Run in terminal window” or “Run as a different user”. The problem is these options are the kind of settings you want to set when you run
particular commands. You probably do not want to make them permanent. As a result I think they are quite useless.

It would be more useful to add new keywords, like “run-in-term” or “run-as”. This way when I want to run an app in a terminal I can type “run-in-term”. And to run as a different user: “run-as “.

Even more goodness

The second tab of the config dialog let you choose between “Command oriented” and “Task oriented” user interfaces.

The “Task oriented” interface looks like this:

It’s quite nice and let you easily go through the “run candidates” by pressing the left and right arrow, with a nice animation between them.

It has a few drawbacks though:

• I find the popup list on the right useless and not that nice.
• One needs to press Enter once to select the run candidate, then another time to start it. Pressing Enter once should be enough.
• There is not way to enter text, which makes it impossible to enter command parameters, use the calculator or paste an url.

Final words

KRunner really has more than meet the eyes. With a bit of work to make this raw power more visible, it would be even better. Here are a few ideas:

• The features should have a way to communicate how they work, for example by stating which “words” they provide. This way Powerdevil could tell me it understands various “suspend” words and I could probably figure out how the “Unit Converter” feature works .
  This could be done with a master-detail view: selecting a feature could show an info page on the right of the list.
• There should be multiple lines of text below the icons so that it’s easier to distinguish between them (it would help Powerdevil for example)

Hmm… I should probably fill some Bugzilla wishes for those.

So, these 2 days at Linux Day in Cinisello really went great. I met a lot of new people, and received astonishing feedback. The talk me and Riccardo held was really a huge success, and people are definitely in love with KDE4. The funny thing is that I read everywhere that KDE4 is not ready for prime time, the first stable version will be 4.3 (??), and some unuseful rants like that.

The truth is that most of the laptops I saw at LD were running KDE4, I performed/helped on a pair of installations of KDE4, and the feedback I got was literally: “Finally something cool that works well”. So maybe people ranting their back off simply didn’t try KDE 4.

Obviously, our talk about new stuff in KDE 4.2 raised even more interest, and people are really looking forward to January. Having your work appreciated is always great, and when I attend events like these and I meet so many grateful people, I really feel we’re doing a huge work.

Talking about code, I have (finally) introduced an improved poll loader in PowerDevil, thanks to an extremely detailed bug, and I take this occasion to thank everyone who helped by submitting bugs/wishlists. This addition makes poller choice more accurate and effective, and makes the whole PowerDevil lighter and more efficient thanks to a cached loading system.

I also got a huge feedback on DeviceSync, so I am going to answer here some questions. Regarding the IO slave stuff, I’m thinking seriously about that. Though, before starting to work on it, I’d like to have the Plugin API complete and working, so that people can start writing some plugins. What is really needed at the moment is iPod and NJB, so that we can provide support for the most common portable media players. MTP seems to work nice, and I’ll import the code in playground really soon, I promise

And about supporting this-that-and even that one: the plugin architecture makes it possible to support any kind of device: media players, phones, smartphones, whatever. Obviously, it focuses on file transfer: for PIM synchronization there are already a lot of great tools out there, and I surely don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

So, I think it’s enough for today, see you soon

So, I’m back blogging, mainly thanks to the fact that my previous post has received an impressive feedback (which I didn’t expect, thanks!). So, first of all I wanted to say I’ve already implemented in PowerDevil some of your suggestions (first of all, the possibility of running a script upon profile loading), though I have some more news for you.

I have radically changed the polling system. It is now modular and selectable by the user. This because fredrich pointed me to a nice XSync feature that allowed real idle counter support without polling and/or hacks, and I really wanted to implement it. By now, you can choose in the configuration dialog to use this new XSync based method (that still needs serious testing), or the old, solid, widget grabber method.

This is not the only important news: PowerDevil has just been moved in kdebase/workspace. You probably wonder “oh no, what can I do now for using it on my 4.1 installation?”. But you just don’t have to worry, because I’ve created a tag (thanks toma) for PowerDevil, right here. You can checkout and build this code, and it should work with your KDE 4.1 installation. I’ll try to keep this tag up-to-date, and if you could give me some feedback about compilation on 4.1, it would be great.

On a side note, I wanted to confirm what Riccardo said yesterday: we’ll be working on Raptor, together with Alessandro, Davide and Lukas. So you can already expect it to be great I’ll work on the dataengine + tom, together with Lukas (so strange we hack together, huh? )

For the bad news, I’ll be not-so-active in the next 4-5 days, since I have an exam on Friday, and I’d better study for it :\

Enough for today, see you on next post!

Scary, huh? On a side note, hello Planet, this is my first post that will actually get syndacated. I excuse for giving you updates on what I work on just now, though I’m really dumb about RSS feeds, so credits to Riddell for 1) adding me to the planet 2) showing me how to filter RSS by categories :\

Anyway, some of you might know what PowerDevil is, some might not; well, for you who fear this is yet another attempt of threatening your lives, PowerDevil is a power manager for KDE4, and it won’t kill you. Credits to sandsmark for this beautiful name

Being serious for a moment, PowerDevil takes a pretty different approach than all other KDE-based powermanagers until now. PowerDevil is lightweight, and I mean for real, and it’s fully integrated in your KDE Desktop. This is because PowerDevil it’s not the usual application you see in the tray, but just a KDED module, aka a daemon. Right, everything happens in background and you don’t have to care. And, for your battery’s sake, it doesn’t poll your system. I spent some time refining some existing algorythms, and I think I have reached the maximum level of efficency.

It is splitted in 2 main components: the daemon and a KCModule to configure it. But let me show you something

Here you can define your profiles.

Now some bits on its architecture: PowerDevil is fully based on solid, and I mean 100%. It is also able to detect your system’s capabilities, so that only supported configuration options will be shown to you. Nice, isn’t it?

PowerDevil notifications look like this

So far so good, though you probably wonder where to see system status, where to change profiles manually and so on. The answer is easy, and it’s Plasma.

Did I mention Plasma is the future? And this is how future looks, at least in power management

Goodies are not over, and a Plasmoid is coming, letting you do everything the KRunner already does. The engine in kdebase has already been extended, and sebas is working on the Battery applet to bring you another I-must-have-it plasmoid on your dashboard.

So, want to give it a shot? PowerDevil is, at the moment, in kdereview, but will be soon moved to kdebase and will be the default powermanager in KDE 4.2. It works cool on KDE4.1 too (we kdemod guys are already using it), so you can already taste how it looks like.

Comments, help, feedback, insults and whatever are always welcome

Hey everyone!

I know, it’s been a long time since my last post… the truth is that I’ve been *really* busy with my exams (but I’ve passed them, a huge satisfaction ) and with some life stuff, but everything seems to be coming along quite nicely.

Well, strictly life-speaking, everything is slowing getting better, and I really feel my next holidays (I’ll be away the whole August) will be the turn I was waiting for. Or better: a new start, the turn could happen during or after them, who knows? Surely I’m looking forward to what is going to happen in the next 2 months.

About Development, Tribe is taking Shape and it’s almost ready to rock, code for Shaman 1.0 is freezed and releasing is a matter of days, and I’ve started development of PowerDevil, a power manager for KDE4, together with Thomas. We’ll surely make something awesome, as you can always expect

I hope everyone is enjoying their holidays, if you’re already into them, or I just wish you to have a great holiday, at least as great as mine will surely be