GNOME Power Manager Works In Solaris

After several months of hard working, We finally make GNOME Power Manager (GPM) partly work in Solaris on some Toshiba laptops.

In fact, as a popular desktop system, GNOME has been integrated in Solaris for a long time. But until now, we can't port a desktop power management application into Solaris because of the lack of driver support. User of Solaris 10 have to use the old GUI application called "dtpower" to perform power management configuration. Comparing with "dtpower" in Solaris 10, as one of the new generation PM tools, GPM has more features and is more user-friendly.



Features

In summary, GPM provides features as follows:

1 Battery Monitor
- power status (AC, battery charging, battery discharging and
battery power volume)
- Emit notification message and beep when battery power is
critically low
- perform the specified action when battery is below the critical
level

2 Suspend&Hibernate
- suspend manually
- hibernate manually (only on sparc for now)

3 Brightness support
- brightness hot-key
- brightness applet, show and adjust brightness level by mouse
- Set the specified brightness level in different power modes.

4 CPU scaling policy
- ondemand
- performance

5 Hot-key support
- power button
- brightness hot-key

6 Lid support
- perform the specified action including blank, suspend and hibernate when lid is closed.
- beep when lid is closed/opened.

7 Configuration switching between AC power and Battery Power
- change the action configuration when lid is closed (the action is
one of nothing, blank screen, suspend and hibernate)
- change the action configuration when battery is below the critical
level. (Only in battery mode)
- change the CPU scaling policy
- change the brightness level

8 Preferences
- action when lid is closed (in ac and battery power mode)
- action when battery is critically low (only in battery power mode)
- brightness level (in ac and battery power mode)
- cpu scaling policy (in ac and battery power mode)
- action when power button is pressed (general)
- action when suspend button is pressed (general)

You may wonder why not support suspend or hibernate automatically. Currently, this is work only for the first phase. In the second phase, we have still more work to do to support this feature.

Installation

System Requirement:
Toshiba M5, M8, M9, and A9 and any systems that support ACPI fully.
Solaris Nevada 75 or any version after 75

Download the package
GPM Hal support: A tar package file which you need to extract it before you can use.
GPM Package: Solaris package that you need to use pkgadd to install it.

How to install

1. extract the packages
# gtar zxvf 1_23_08_x86.tar.gz
this creates a directory '1_23_08_x86' in which with 'driver' and 'hal' sub-directories.
# gtar zxvf gnome-power-manager-02-20-x86.tar.gz
this command createa a directory 'gnome-power-manager-02-20-x86'
2. Copy the battery and power driver to your system.
# cp 1_23_08_x86/driver/debug32/* /kernel/drv
for 64 bit , # cp 1_23_08_x86/driver/debug64/* /kernel/drv/amd64

3. Copy all HAL files
# cp 1_23_08_x86/hal/* /usr/lib/hal

4. Upgrade hicolor theme
#cp gnome-power-manager-02-20-x86/index.theme /usr/share/icons/hicolor

5. Install two Solaris packages
#pkgadd -d gnome-power-manager-02-20-x86
Please select 'all'.

6 Reboot

Now, after you reboot your machine, you can see there's a power icon in the right bottom(system tray) of your panel like the following picture:


you can right click or left click with your mouse to pop-up command menu in which you can select some commands such as "Preferences", "Power History", and "Suspend"(If your computer drivers support it)

Brightness Applet

There's also a new applet called "Brightness Applet" which you can use to adjust screen brightness by mouse.



Battery Monitor


If you unplug the power, the machine will be running in battery power. GPM can show the battery status such as power volume, the remaining time the machine can work. If the power is critically low, a warning will be pop-up to ask you to plug the AC power or shutdown the computer.

Anyway, GPM really works in Solaris. You can try "Suspend" & "Resume", but because of the driver issue, my laptop still can't resume after suspend. :( Guys of driver team are busy in dealing with these issues.

See More...

Project page in GNOME: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnome-power-manager/ which contains project information about development, features and screenshots

Project page in OpenSolaris: gpm , acpi hal and cpufreq hal