Tools

I am please to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.68.

This release is mainly focused on integration with the newer init system, systemd. Without the help from the awesome Debian systemd maintainers, this would not have been possible. Thank you folks.

While the focus now is on systemd, LMT will still support the older SysV Init.

With this new release, there are some new files: laptop-mode.service, laptop- mode.timer and lmt-poll.service. All the files should be documented well enough for users. lmt-poll.service is the equivalent of the module battery- level-polling , should you need it.

For this year’s Google Summer of Code, I have been mentoring Yuru Roy Shao, on Integrating Apport with Debian. Yuru is a CS student studying at University of Michigan, USA completing his PhD.

For around 2+ years, Apport was packaged for Debian, but remained in Experimental. While we did have a separate (Debian BTS aware) crashdb, the general concerns (bug spam, too many duplicates etc) were the reason we held its inclusion.

I am pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.67.

This release has many important bug fixes, and everyone is recommended to upgrade. Of the many, one important fix is to, more reliably check for Device Mapper based devices, which is common these days with Crypt and LVM.

For the summary of changes to quote from git log:

1.67 - Thu Jul  2 17:05:07 IST 2015
    * Relax minimum window size to accomodate low res screens
    * Fix variable name to comply with our "constants" assuptions
    * Get more aggressive in power saving for Intel HD Audio
    * Account Device Mapper devices
    * Add swsusp freeze support
    * Switch battery-level-polling default to True
    * Detect ethernet carrier, early and relibaly
    * changes the boolean setting *_ACTIVATE_SATA_POWER to a customizable
      *_SATA_POLICY, with backward-compatible defaults and documentation
      Thanks Yuir D'Elia

PS: On a side note, over the years, Linux’s power savings functionality has improved a lot, all thanks to its use in the mobile worlds. At the same time, because of more companies shipping drivers depending on external firmware, stability has become less reliable. And to add to that, bare functionality of devices typically ask for disabling, you know what, LPM.

Looking at the PTS entries, I realized that it has been more than 2 yrs, since I pushed the first Apport packages into Debian.

We have talked about it [in the past](http://www.researchut.com/blog/report- bugs-with-apport-3), and do not see a direct need for apport yet. That is one reason why it still resides (and will continue to) in Experimental.

Even though not used as a bug reporting tool, Apport can still be a great tool for (end) users to detect crashes. It can also be used to find further details about program crashes and pointers to look further.

I am pleased to announce the release of apt-offline - 1.6

This release is mostly a bug fix release, which every user should upgrade to. It also fixes a major bug in the way we limited the validation of GPG integrity, for the APT repository lists ( Thank you Paul Wise ).

Also, In the last release, we migrated from custom magic library to the python shipped ctype python-magic library. That allowed some bugs to creep, and hopefully now, all those bugs should be fixed. A big thanks to Roland Summers for his bug reports and continuous feedback.

I am pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools at version 1.66.

This release fixes an important bug in the way Laptop Mode Tools is invoked. Users, now when disable it in the config file, the tool will be disabled. Thanks to bendlas @github for narrowing it down. The GUI configuration tool has been improved, thanks to Juan. And there is a new power saving module for users with ATI Radeon cards. Thanks to M. Ziebell for submitting the patch.

I am very pleased to announce the release of apt-offline, version 1.5.

In version 1.4, the offline bug report functionality had to be dropped. In version 1.5, it is back again. apt-offline now uses the new Debian native BTS library. Thanks to its developers, this library is much more slim and neat. The only catch is that it depends on the SOAPpy library which currently is not stock in Python. If you run apt-offline of Debian, you may not have to worry as I will add a Recommends on that package. For users using it on Microsoft Windows, please ensure that you have the SOAPpy library installed. It is available on pypi.

apt-offline 1.4 has been released [1]. This is a minor bug fix release. In fact, one feature, offline bug reports (–bug-reports), has been dropped for now.

The Debian BTS interface seems to have changed over time and the older debianbts.py module (that used the CGI interface) does not seem to work anymore. The current debbugs.py module seems to have switched to the SOAP interface.

There are a lot of changes going on personally, I just haven’t had the time to spend. If anyone would like to help, please reach out to me. We need to use the new debbugs.py module. And it should be cross-platform.

I am very pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools , at version 1.65

This release took a toll given things have been changing for me, both personally and professionally. 1.64 was released on September 1st, 2013. So it was a full 9 month period, of which a good 2-3 months were procrastination. That said, this release has some pretty good bug fixes and I urge all distribution packagers to push it to their repositories soon. While I ’d thank all contributors who have helped make this release, a special thank you to Stefan Huber. Stefan found/fixed many issues, did the messy code clean up etc.. Thank you.

I just released Laptop Mode Tools @ version 1.64. And am pleased to introduce the new graphical utility to toggle individual power saving modules in the package.

The GUI is written using the PyQT Toolkit and the options in the GUI are generated at runtime, based on the list of available power saving modules.

Apart from the GUI configuration tool, this release also includes some bug fixes:

• Don’t touch USB Controller power settings. The individual devices, when plugged in, while on battery, inherit the power settings from the USB controller
• start-stop-programs: add support for systemd. Thanks to Alexander Mezin
• Replace hardcoded path to udevadm with “which udevadm”. Thanks to Alexander Mezin
• Honor .conf files only. Thanks to Sven Köhler
• Make ‘/usr/lib’ path configurable. This is especially useful for systems that use /usr/lib64, or /lib64 directly. Thanks to Nicolas Braud-Santoni
• Don’t call killall with the -g argument. Thanks to Murray Campbell
• Fix RPM Spec file build errors

The Debian package will follow soon. I don’t intend to introduce a new package for the GUI tool because the source is hardly 200 lines. So the dependencies (pyqt packages) will go as Recommeds or Suggests