Hello New forum member but long time KDE user.

I have been successfully compiling and running trunk since about August with great pleasure. The devs are doing great work! BTW - I am using a Macbook second generation Intel and Kubuntu 8.10. Also, I'm using the distro copy of Qt.

A couple days ago I updated from SVN and rebuilt everything. All is working fine except for the ability to adjust the cpu frequency governor and screen brightness from PowerDevil. Some attempts to do so by other means have also proved fruitless - so I am to believe that PowerDevil is not the cause, but I'm not sure. The strange thing is that in the cpu governor drop down list no options are given. The list is empty.

Does anyone know what could cause the scaling options to disappear? The same goes for the loss of the ability to adjust the brightness. I don't think I made any significant changes to other parts of my system, so I don't know where to look.

Thanks!

Can't reproduce that here, although my CPU does not support scaling, but changing screen brightness through PowerDevil now works fine ( the battery applet & when my scheme changes )

@OP
It is most likely an incompatibility issue. Have you checked that these (scaling and brightness control) work with any other software (viz kpowersave or guidance-power-manager) or operating system?
To see if scaling is supported, see under System Settings -> Advanced -> Power Management -> Capabilities and see what all are there for "Supported CPU policies" and "supported schemes"

Please check with lshal if HAL is broken, if that works, try solid-power* and see what that reports. This should make it easy to show where in the software stack things are going wrong.

Thanks for the replies!

I realize that maybe I didn't explain this clear enough. All that I described that isn't working *was* working just a week ago. By checking the "Capabilities" tab in System Settings -> Advanced -> Power Management it no longer states that cpu scaling is supported. But I know for a fact that it is, because it used to work just fine.

sebas - The only command that I have that finished solid-power* is solid-powermanagement. The output of 'solid-powermanagement query cpufreq' is:

Code: Select all

solid-powermanagement(7269)/kdecore (KSycoca) KSycocaPrivate::openDatabase: Trying to open ksycoca from  "/var/tmp/kdecache-echughes/ksycoca4"
solid-powermanagement(7269)/kdecore (KLibLoader) kde4Factory: The library "/home/kde4/kde4/lib/kde4/solid_hal_power.so" does not offer a qt_plugin_instance function.
solid-powermanagement(7269) Solid::Control::ManagerBasePrivate::loadBackend: Backend loaded:  "HAL-Power"


Some other helpful information might be from lshal:

Code: Select all

$ lshal | grep backlight
udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/macbook_backlight'
  info.addons = {'hald-addon-macbook-backlight'} (string list)
  info.udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/macbook_backlight'  (string)
$ lshal | grep cpu
  info.addons = {'hald-addon-cpufreq', 'hald-addon-acpi'} (string list)
  info.capabilities = {'cpufreq_control'} (string list)


Hope this provides a couple more clues...

same problem here, i am using kubuntu 8.10 on hp compaq 6720s and everything seemed to be working 7 days ago, and now i cant adjust brightness, not by means of power management scroll bar in settings menu nor by keyboard shortcuts.

something must have happened some update or something that broke this.
if you do find a solution please do post it here.

It ddin't use to work with beta 2 IIRC, but later snapshots from trunk work now. So you may want to try with RC1 (out later this week, around Thursday probably) and see if it's fixed.

Having just upgraded to 4.2 RC1 using the Kubuntu packages I am now suffering the same problem. For some reason, I am unable to move the brightness slider at all in Powerdevil.

I tried:
$ solid-powermanagement brightness set '100'
$ Setting brightness to 100%
$ solid-powermanagement(7390) Solid::Control::ManagerBasePrivate::loadBackend: Backend loaded: "HAL-Power"

but that has zero effect.

Any ideas (other than waiting for the final release;-))?

My problem is solved.
Actually i was not using new 4.2 but rather 4.1.3 and my problem with screen brightness was just fixed.

So what happend?!
I am on kubuntu and these last few day i was receiving updates for new kernel, but it seemed that every few days i received only few packages of new kernel. It doesn't make much sense to me but it looked like none of these updates were complete, and today i think i received last part of new 2.6.27-11-generic kernel and now everything seems to work fine.

MirzaD wrote:
...
I am on kubuntu and these last few day i was receiving updates for new kernel, but it seemed that every few days i received only few packages of new kernel. It doesn't make much sense to me but it looked like none of these updates were complete, and today i think i received last part of new 2.6.27-11-generic kernel and now everything seems to work fine.

You are absolutely right, the problem was the kernel. Powerdevil also works fine on my computer now, so it was obviously some sort of packaging mistake.