Laptop Power Management and 2.6.24+

["Leo L. Schwab" <ewhac@ewhac.org>]

	My apologies for the saga appearing below, but I'm starting to get
confused about where Debian is going vis a vis power management for laptops,
and hoped to beg some advice.

	I currently have 'laptop-mode-tools', 'acpi-support', and
'hibernate' installed, which have served me well in the past.  I selected
them because:
	- 'laptop-mode-tools' appears to be the best maintained tool for
	  flipping in and out of power saving modes when the mains are
	  unplugged;
	- 'hibernate' has facilities for stopping and restarting services
	  and unloading/reloading kernel modules that don't behave well.
	  'acpi-support' recently grew something similar to this, but from
	  reading the scripts, it looked like 'acpi-support' and 'hibernate'
	  could have a fight over who does what, and it wasn't clear who
	  would or should win.  So I stuck with 'hibernate';
	- I don't, as a rule, use GNOME or KDE, and prefer all the little
	  daemons running around to be universal and work no matter which
	  window manager (*cough*WindowMaker*cough*) I happen to be using,
	  including none at all.

	Anyhoo, I recently grabbed 2.6.24 and compiled my own copy.  I
always grovel through almost the entire config space, and found this
somewhat imperious declaration for ACPI_PROC_EVENT:

----
          A user-space daemon, acpi, typically read /proc/acpi/event
          and handled all ACPI sub-system generated events.

          These events are now delivered to user-space via
          either the input layer, or as netlink events.

          This build option enables the old code for legacy
          user-space implementation.  After some time, this will
          be moved under CONFIG_ACPI_PROCFS, and then deleted.

          Say Y here to retain the old behaviour.  Say N if your
          user-space is newer than kernel 2.6.23 (September 2007).
----

	I keep my userspace pretty much pegged to 'unstable', which seems to
me to be newer than September 2007.  Yet when I turned on
CONFIG_ACPI_PROCFS, things started breaking.

	'acpid' won't run at all, since /proc/acpi/event no longer exists.
Okay, fair enough, except that this causes 'laptop-mode-tools' to do
essentially nothing, since ACPI events are no longer generated to drive it,
and it doesn't appear to have grown support for the input layer or netlink
events.

	After some Googling around, it seems there's a movement afoot to
have all power-related stuff go through dbus.  The only thing I've located
so far that handles this is 'gnome-power-manager', which seems to lack the
flexibility of 'acpi-support' and 'laptop-mode-tools', and it seems
(unconfirmed) to demand an X server be running.

	I can turn CONFIG_ACPI_PROCFS back on in the meantime, I suppose,
but I was wondering where things were headed with this.  Are there any
"generic" daemons out there using the new event facilities that serve as a
reasonable replacement for 'laptop-mode-tools' and/or 'acpi-support', and
which work without X running?

	Thanks in advance.

					Schwab