how to figure out what is doing power management on my fresh sid laptop

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@post.harvard.edu>]

Hi,
I have a fresh install of debian rapidly upgraded to sid on a lenovo x220.
I noticed it was not doing proper power management and battery was rapidly going to zero.
I have tried googling 
and looked at such places as wiki.debian.org/Suspend
but I see no design documents for the power management.
I see the statement

"This page gathers bits of information about getting software suspend to work in Debian. 
Because the core system components change rapidly among Debian versions, software suspend 
works differently on different versions of Debians. 
This page is divided according to Debian versions from new to old."

I have pm-utils installed which nicely suspends when I invoke  pm-suspend.

However if I leave the laptop alone it will blank the screen after a period of time
but I dont know what has happened - is is just a screen blanking but the full system
is still active  or has it actually suspended?
How to find out what happened?
I have no idea what is going on.

Moreover on my  older ibook g4 running sid the laptop takes care of all issues by itself. It really does nicely suspend
and when I hit a key I see messages from the kernel about the modules being reloaded etc. What a pleasure. I am not sure 
what is going on there - suspect it has to do with pbbuttonsd or something. Bless the author of that.

What do I do to see what is happening? What is the right way to configure it so that it will work?
Does the team responsible for debian power management such as suspend and hibernate  have a design document or a
web site or mailing list that I can read to find out about how things work now that hal is deprecated.

I figure I must use some kind of combination of 
acpid and pm-utils and cpufreqd and uswsusp.

I see a gentoo power management guide.
I wish I could tell what is going on, what is already configured and what to fix to make my system
use power proportionaly to my needs and sleep when I am reading a book.

Note that I run sid to keep up  with the latest and am more than willing to tinker. I just wish I had more
information to use to figure  out what is happening.

Thanks
Mitchell Laks