My space in the world

Powerdevil is a feature rich power manager for KDE. I had been using kpowersave on KDE4.1.3, and now powerdevil looks great !!

General Settings

General Settings Screen Dimming, Battery Levels and Notification settings. Powerdevil uses knotify with a sound event and customizable messages for it’s notifications.

Power Profiles

Powerdevil provides 5 default power profiles that are customizable:

• Performance
• Presentation
  
• Powersave
• Aggressive Powersave
• Xtreme Powersave

Edit Profiles

Provides options to create new/edit existing profiles. For each profile, the following fields are customizable:

• Screen brightness
• Kwin compositing toggle on/off
• Computer idle actions
• Power/Sleep/Lid button actions
• CPU frequency scaling
• Turning off CPUs
• Screen power management

Also provides options to Import/Export and clone profiles.

Capabilities

This screen lists all system capabilities that Powerdevil can make use off.

Sadly, my laptop does not support turning off of CPUs. Everything else work perfectly.
Powerdevil is most likely to be integrated in KDE4.2
At first, I was a bit surprised after not seeing a systray icon, but well, I don’t need one really. I use the Battery Status plasma in 4.1.3, while the same widget integrates well with powerdevil in 4.2
This is definitely worth trying..

I had a friend visiting over last night asking for a PC Suite for Motorola phones for his Windows box for accessing the internet via GPRS. That reminded me that I had a basic Moto phone myself thrown somewhere. After a bit of head-banging, I discovered where it was, plugged out my N73, plugged the Moto in, configured wvdial a bit and w00t! I was online

Poor friend of mine! Wonder if he found a Moto PC suite somewhere. I’ll offer him Ubuntu next time he calls up/visits

I have always been a compiz fanboy. I have lived on Gnome since my first Ubuntu install.
My migration to KDE has been worth the hassle though. KDE 4.1.3 and KDE 4.2 are amazing with a great UI, features and give a variety of great software to it’s users (Amarok!!!). I absolutely love plasma and oxygen.

But the only thing that is making me rip off hair from my head is my graphics driver, I guess. I must say that compiz was *very* smooth on my old laptop (T5500, 1GiG DDR2, Intel GMA950 onboard). But no matter what I use in Kubuntu Intrepid, I can’t seem to get a smooth output.
Say for example, launching FF can never be smooth and the window is heavily distorted upon opening:

This applies to all menus, all windows, everything. Looks very odd and ugly. Even compiz runs very slow. Surprisingly, glxgears still shows around 1100-1200 fps as it did in Hardy. Neither am I trying to get direct rendering working on an Intel GPU. I wonder has it got anything to do with the fact that I never actually downloaded the stable version of Kubuntu, but I kept on adding updates to the Intrepid alpha I once downloaded.

Am I the only one with this, or do I have company? Oh well, I guess not many have an old laptop like me