KDE4 on PowerBook

[Massimo B.]

Hello.
With this thread I'm going to collect all KDE4 issues on PowerBooks:

• Collisions with pbbuttonsd:
  
  
  • The powermanagement of KDE4 allows to configure modes for AC or battery power such as pbbuttonsd does. Is it advised to disable that and let pbbuttonsd do the job? So far I had no problems with KDE4 but I did not touch the KDE4 settings of this section.
    
  • New kmix has its own on screen display, so for volume I currently have both OSDs gtkpbbuttons and kmix. Not found yet how to disable kmix.
    
  • This actually is an issue already there with KDE3.5 and maybe rather about X: After kdm has come up, the LCDBRIGHTNESS always is at maximum, eventhough pbbuttonsd was not configured to:

    Code:

    # grep "LCD_Bright" /etc/pbbuttonsd.cnf LCD_Brightness=50

    This is also the case when the display resumes.
    
    Then the display turns completely dark after idle timeout without pbbuttonsd:

    Code:

    # grep "DimFullyDark" /etc/pbbuttonsd.cnf DimFullyDark=false

    That tells me that KDE powersettings seems to overwrite pbbuttonsd behaviour.

Personally I would prefer keep using pbbuttonsd for power management control and stay with my carefully configured /etc/power/pmcs-pbbuttonsd and scripts (yes I made the book speak with my own speech-dispatcher scripts, going to publish of s.o. is interested).

In general even on the latest PowerBook G4 the new desktop effects and visualization is quite slow, but usable. Not sure if there are possible X improvements to be expected or if that graphics board (ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]) is just at the limit of its capabilities.

I'm going to report further experiences here...
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HP ZBook Power 15.6" G8 i7-11800H|HP EliteDesk 800G1 i7-4790|HP Compaq Pro 6300 i7-3770

[Massimo B.]

I don't see how to disable KDE's powermanagement completely:
For now I just disabled the screen settings for all profiles, so KDE doesnt change LCD brightness anymore and lets pbbuttonsd do the job.
The powermanagement section in KDEs systemsettings is a bit confusing. For profiles there are 3 tabs on the right: actions, screen and cpu-stuff. Actions I disabled every event. On screen I disabled powermanagement. For CPU it actually does the same as other cpu frequency tools that is switching the cpu governor between powersave, performance and userspace. After a while I decided to use sys-power/powernowd and would like to stick to that for dynamic load depending switching. But I did not find out how to disable the KDE cpu settings completely or even delete the profiles.
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HP ZBook Power 15.6" G8 i7-11800H|HP EliteDesk 800G1 i7-4790|HP Compaq Pro 6300 i7-3770

[gringo]

just wanted to ask a related question : does kde´s power management ( or more specifically powerdevil ) even work for someone here in ppc world ?
Because it apparently doesn´t know how handle any event in my wife´s powerbook, at all. I mean, disconnect the power supply and it doesn´t know that it is sucking from battery f.ex.

cheers
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Error: Failing not supported by current locale

[Ato]

[gringo]

[Massimo B.]

I noticed that the slowness is based somewhere else. The process plasma-desktop keeps always around 50% CPU load in top. As fallback I'm back on fluxbox for a while, using KDE applications which run lot faster there.
Before opening a new thread here about that CPU usage, I will try from scratch with a clean xorg.conf to figure out the problem.
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HP ZBook Power 15.6" G8 i7-11800H|HP EliteDesk 800G1 i7-4790|HP Compaq Pro 6300 i7-3770

[gringo]

i tried using all the fancy stuff and the "semantic desktop" thingy but both render the box useless.
Sure, i use fluxbox a lot myself too but my wife isn´t really happy with such a limited interface

no xorg.conf here btw.

cheers
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Error: Failing not supported by current locale

[Massimo B.]

[gringo]

[Massimo B.]

I don't think so. This CPU load when idle seems to be a bug or misconfiguration.
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HP ZBook Power 15.6" G8 i7-11800H|HP EliteDesk 800G1 i7-4790|HP Compaq Pro 6300 i7-3770

[gringo]

i didnt read the other thread carefully enough, you already mentioned there you have plasmoids and effects turned off.
In that case, yeah, looks like a bug or configuration issue to me too. Any chance you running xorg-1.8 & kms ? because i had some serious X performance troubles with this combination in my pb.

cheers
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Error: Failing not supported by current locale

[Massimo B.]