chris wrote:
Hi,
> The advantages in terms of energy use must surely be tiny given
> that we're talking about 5sec of reducing consumption by maybe
> 0.5W. On the other hand turning off the backlight completely
> after a certain amount of time as a first measure to reduce power
> consumption strikes me as an interesting alternative to the
> current implementation...
We'll do both -- dim the backlight and suspend, and set an alarm for a
wakeup to turn off the screen altogether a few minutes later. The
reason for leaving the backlight dimmed for a few minutes is that it
might be possible for you to continue to read the web or book page
that you're looking at while it's dimmed and we're saving the big
watts.
clearly we'll know more as we all use it more. i currently find
the 20 second timeout much too short -- it's far too likely that
i'll still be looking at the screen.
Dimming the screen when idle is extremely common for laptops; OS X
and gnome-power-manager do it too, so I don't think it's too much of
a distraction. With the new versions of OHM, I do the dimming as a
fade rather than an atomic change, so that should help it be less
distracting too. (If it still feels distracting, I could make the
fade take a little longer? It takes around 150ms right now.)
i also find the fade-up to be more distracting than the
fade-down. and i think it makes the resume appear to take longer
than it really does. (i tried the fade-up in powerd, and
switched to instant-on pretty quickly.)
paul
=---------------------
paul fox, pgf(a)laptop.org