hey guys, i have a question for you, and i'm not sure if this is the right forum for it.

i've been noticing a strange icon and progress bar appear some times - not sure if it's when idle or if its just random, but, it's a small rectagular overlay in the middle of the screen with a computer icon on the left and a progress bar on the right. when it first appears, it will usually say some thing like "50%" or "33%" with the progress bar reflecting the said value, and, as soon as i move the mouse or touch a key, it says "100%", with the progess bar moving up to 100%, and then the thing just disappears. i've searched around for a bit, and i'm not sure what it is. any ideas?

thanks in advance!

any chance you can post a pic?

also what distribution and version of KDE? could it be a package manager searching for updates?

are you running any non-KDE sw

note: the forum does not host pics, you will need to link to the pic or use image tags for them to be displayed

i'm sorry, but i can grab a pic - it disappears as soon as i press a key. i don't believe that it is coming from any other software, for 2 reasons: (1) at the moment i am not running other software (GTK interfaces, etc), just KDE programs (trying to get adjusted to a KDE-only environment; (2) it appears to be using the same colors and effects (translucency and drop shadow) as other items in the window environment.

i SUSPECT that this may be a sort of "screen time to lock" bar, that intermittently shows up when idle. does that sound like the behaviour of KDE's screen saver, or, any thing else that you guys are aware of?

Sounds like the brightness change notification - power management is probably dimming your screen due to inactivity, and triggering the display at the same time.

Does something similar show up if you use the brightness change keys on your keyboard, or if you use the battery applet to change the current screen brightness?

actually, i just noticed that when using the keyboard hotkeys to turn the volume up or down, i see the SAME thing, but with a speaker icon to the left, instead of a display icon, so, it appears that you might be right on the money with this one.

thanks for your time!

Not a problem. The volume icon is referring to the volume level though rather than the brightness level (some laptops have brightness keys as well).