Power management (acpid vs. powerdevil)

rahulthewall · Veteran Joined: 01 Nov 2007 Posts: 1264 Location: Zürich

Reading from the gentoo power management guide available here the main role of components such as sys-power/acpid and sys-power/powermgmt-base seems to be to react to acpi events. However, Powerdevil (KDE4) already manages this quite nicely - I can already set up most of the power management settings using powerdevil. So my question is simple - is there actually a need to have acpid installed and running when one is using powerdevil. If yes, what are the advantages that acpid would provide over powerdevil?
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Rexilion · Veteran Joined: 17 Mar 2009 Posts: 1044

I don't have acpid since it interferes with the powermanagement from XFCE. With acpid, you could script stuff yourself, but if you let powerdevil do it, you get a nice GUI and maybe some more features. I don't have it, and my powerbutton/desktoplid work without a problem

rahulthewall · Veteran Joined: 01 Nov 2007 Posts: 1264 Location: Zürich

Same here, I don't have acpid installed. As far as I see it, it is a "script only" power manager. Which is good, if you are on a server, or are used to working without X a lot. However, if one is using a full blown DE like KDE, Gnome or XFCE then there is no need to use acpid. These DEs come with their own power managers which do a pretty decent job of managing all the power requirements.

The Gentoo Power Management Guide should be updated to reflect this. That guide needs an update anyway, it is pretty old.
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Who shall guard the guards?