Happy Work, Happy Life: This records my happy work

In today's staff meeting, Harry passed down information got from the meeting he participated last week in Dublin. OpenSolaris will become our next year's objective. A new project - Ubuntu parity, led by Dermot and Tom, will be the most important project for desktop team. There are around 100 packages will be delivered into OpenSolaris over the coming year. Every engineer in Beijing will be assigned several packages.

Another project that is ongoing is GNOME 2.24 upgrading which is not much different than before. Going forward with the community is the regular policy.

From the plan for next year, I don't see any new applications from desktop beijing team. I guess our focus will be on Ubuntu Parity and GNOME upgrading. 

In Toshiba Power Save, it provides seven system predefined profiles which can be selected by users

• Full power: This profile is for setting the PC at the highest performance.
• AC optimized: This profile is for high performance but cut off power in idle.
• High Power: This profile is for controlling reduction of power consumption when the PC performance takes priority over the battery life.
• Normal: This profile is for controlling reduction of power consumption for the PC consistent with the PC performance and the battery life.
• DVD playback: This profile is for controlling reduction of power consumption for DVD playbacks on the PC consistent with the PC performance and the battery life.
• Presentation: This profile is for controlling reduction of power consumption when doing presentation tools with the PC consistent with the PC performance and the battery life.
• Long life: This profile is for controlling reduction of power consumption when the battery life takes priority over PC performance.

A profile defines a combination of following power settings:

• LCD brightness

The screen darkens if a lower number is chosen, but the battery life will be increased. This screen brightens if a higher number is chosen, but the battery life will be reduced.

• CPU control method

auto & fixed, this function enables a reduction in the power consumption of your PC by controlling the CPU clock frequency. CPU slows if a lower number is chosen, which will improve Battery life, but system performance may decrease. CPU performance increases if a higher number is chosen, but battery life will be reduced.

• PCIE power save:

Specify whether to enable or disable the PCI Express bus power save function. If enabled, the power save function saves the power consumption of the PCI express bus and maximizes the duration of battery-driven operation. If the power save function is disabled, the PCI Express bus always operates at its maximum performance but can operate for less hours when driven by the battery.

• Cooling Method

When the temperature of the main PC unit rises, the fan cools it fully. Your PC's operating hours are shortened when using the PC under battery power.

• Screen power OFF time

This function enables a reduction in the power consumption of your PC by turning OFF the LCD, when NOT using your PC for a given time. Your PC operation hours on battery power are lengthened when setting a shorter time. When this function is enabled, the display will return when pressing a key or by touching the mouse or pad.

• HDD power OFF time:

This function enables a reduction in the power consumption of your PC by turning OFF the HDD, when NOT using your PC for a given time. Your PC operation hours on battery power are lengthened when setting a shorter time.:*

• System Standby time (Suspend to RAM):

This function enables a reduction in the power consumption of your PC by enabling System Standby mode, when NOT using your PC for a given time. Your PC operation hours on battery power are lengthened when setting a shorter time.

• System Hibernation Time (Suspend to Disk):

This function enables a reduction in the power consumption of your PC by enabling Hibernation mode, when NOT using your PC for a given time. This function enables a reduction in power consumption, but it takes more time to resume than when resuming from System Standby. (Suspend to RAM). Your PC operation hours on battery power are lengthened when setting a shorter time.

User can specify which profile will become active automatically when a program is running in the foreground.

Options	Full Power	AC Optimized	High Power	Normal	DVD Playback	Presentation	Long Life
Power Usage settings
Screen Brightness	level 8	level 8	level 4	level 2-4	level 5	level 1	level 1
PCIe Power Save	disable	enable	enable	enable	disable	enable	enable
CPU control method	fixed	auto	fixed	auto	fixed	auto	fixed
CPU processing speed	Level 7	Level3-7	Level 7	Level3 - 7	N/A	Level3 - 7	N/A
Cooling Method	Cooling optimized	Maximum performance	Maximum performance	Maximum performance	N/A	Performance	N/A
Power Down settings
Monitor Power OFF	30m	10m	5m	3m	never	never	1m
HDD Power OFF	30m	10m	5m	3m	never	never	1 m
System Standby	disable	Enable - 15m	Enable – 10m	Enable - 5m	disable	disable	enable - 5m
System hibernation	disable	disable	disable	disable	disable	disable	disable

Recently I'm working on the ARC of GnuTLS upgrading from 1.6.3 to 2.2.4. This is my first time to go through the process as the real owner with the chance to face the challenges from senior people.

Currently, Evolution (via libsoup), Ekiga (via Evolution), Vino (via vino-server) depend on it. Due to the license restriction, we will not ship the extra library in Solaris since it is licensed under GPL V3 which is not prefered by Sun Legal. However, Some ARC reviewers asked us to propose the whole case though some part will not be shipped. This makes me a little bit confused about the reason why we invest resource on the stuff that we don't ship. Just because this belongs to one part of the big picture? If the part doesn't affect the understanding of the whole case, there's no need to involve it. 

Sun Evolution is based on GNOME Evolution code base which provides a
rich, Outlook-competitive, messaging and calendaring client, and meets
a critical need in Sun's desktop offering.

Evolution is a personal and workgroup information management solution
for Linux and UNIX-based systems. Evolution integrates email, calendar,
contact and task list management in one powerful, fast and easy-to-use
application. With full support for key data exchange and communications
standards, such as IMAP, POP, SMTP, LDAP, iCalendar, vCard and more,
Evolution enables tight integration with Sun One Messaging and Calendar
Servers and other messaging systems.

Features & functionalities include:
- Powerful email handling
- Powerful flexible calendar
- Integrated information management
- Compatible with existing messaging platforms
- Broad platform support

Evolution includes the following components:

- evolution - The top-level application.
- evolution-data-server - A backend library for Evolution, providing
support for calendar and addressbook.
- evolution-exchange - Evolution connector for Microsoft Exchange.
- evolution-jescs - Evolution connector for Sun Java Enterprise
System Calendar Server (SJESCS) 5.1+.
- evolution-webcal - WebCal support for Evolution. Provides
support for adding online calendars to
Evolution.

Evolution imports the following components which are used
by Evolution, but are general interfaces which may be used by
other projects in the desktop.

- libsoup - A library which provides HTTP client/server
interfaces, including support for SOAP and
XMLRPC interfaces.
- GnuTLS - The GNU project implementation of the TLS
(Transport Layer Security) protocols. It
supports SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1.
- libgcrypt - A general purpose cryptographic library,
based on the code from GnuPG.
- libgpg-error - A small library that defines common error
values for all GnuPG components (including
libgcrypt).

Notes:

- evolution-data-server supports S/MIME v3 through NSS which provides
certificate authentication and encryption. NSS provides RSA, DSA
RC2 and 3DES algorithms for using in S/MIME.

- evolution-data-server supports SSLv2, SSLv3 and TLSv1 stream through
NSS to provide secure email connections.
NSS supports following Encryption Technologies which you can find
from
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/nss-3.11/nss-3.11-algorithms.html

- GnuTLS depends on libgcrypt and uses many libgcrypt algorithms.

- libgcrypt provides hash, encryption/decryption algorithms.

- libgpg-error does not contain any algorithms, it just defines some
macros for various error types.

- libsoup is an HTTP client/server library for GNOME. It provides
SSLv3 support through GnuTLS in a standard way as SSL version 3.0.
libsoup itself does not contain any cryptographic algorithms.

Main differences with the previous Evolution 1.4 version of the export
form:

- Evolution does not depend on OpenSSL. It now depends on NSS.

Refer to the following URLs for further details:

- Evolution Project Website:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution
- libsoup Project Website:
http://live.gnome.org/LibSoup
- GnuTLS Project Website:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/
- libgcrypt Project Website:
http://directory.fsf.org/project/libgcrypt/
- libgpg-error Project Website
http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/libgpg-error/

On Thursday's evening, I attended the 14th OpenSolaris User Group as a lecturer. Aubery Li (李崇）, a guy from Intel gave the first presentation about PowerTop and Solaris Power Management. I gave the presentation titled Solaris Power Management and GNOME Power Manager.

About 80 people attended this activity. Most of the them are from nearby universities such as Tsinghua, Beijing University and China Academy Instititue etc. There are also some people from several IT companies.

From the desktop perspective, I gave a thorough introduction GNOME Power Manager and what we have done to port GPM from Linux to Solaris. Actually, not many people use linux in China, even least people use Solaris desktop. So there's still a long way to go if Opensolaris can be accepted by most users. Indiana is a good product which can attact more developper and users. But considering driver support and more applications, there's still a significant gap between Solaris and Linux. We have to do more.

 

 

 

GNOME Power Manager is a GUI applications and a session daemon as well. It is a GUI since it provides a configuration program which can help the user set Power Management (PM) parameters. It is a daemon since it also provides a back-end program monitoring various events

1. Monitor and show battery status.

 

2. Trigger an action when lid is closed.

These actions contain Do Nothing, Shutdown, Blank Screen, Suspend, Hibernate

3. Set CPU power consuming policy.

Two classes:

ondemand, the kernel can adjust the frequency automatically according to the system load.

performance, the system always run in the maximum performance.

4. Set power button policy.

 

These actions contain Do Nothing, Shutdown, Blank Screen, Suspend, Hibernate, Ask For

5. Adjust screen brightness.

On the panel there's an applet which can adjust screen brightness by dragging and dropping.

6. Suspend/hibernate system

7. Visualize power consumption statistics

At 10:30 am today, I gave a presentation in the JDS forum to the some guys from our department and QE group. I found that I couldn't express myself successfully that is because of lacking of practice.

They gave me a lot of suggestions and I will change the slides after the presentation. The lecture focuses a lot on the driver part while not desktop part, I should add more content to JDS. Moreover, I'm not familiar with the driver part hence I shouldn't talk much about it.

A power scheme is a collection of settings that controls the power usage of your computer. You can use power schemes to reduce the power consumption of individual devices or the entire system.

In Windows XP, User can set options for a power scheme in the Power Options dialog box. Windows XP comes with several pre-configured profiles, they are Home/Office Desk, Portable/Laptop, Presentation, Always on, Minimal Power Management and Max Battery. User also can easily create custom profiles that fine tune the properties for his particular circumstances.

In Max OS, Laptops get a menu option in the Energy Saver panel: Optimize Energy Settings. These are energy profiles you can quickly switch between depending on the circumstance: Better Battery Life, Normal, Better Performance and Custom.

In KDE, KPowersave ships with a set of four preconfigured schemes which you can adjust to your needs. To switch schemes with KPowersave just right-click the panel icon and select Set Active Scheme. The following schemes are available:

• Performance Keep your machine running with full power and full speed to achieve maximum performance.

• Acoustic Apply any measure that makes sure your machine runs as quietly as possible.

• Presentation Disable any display power management and screen savers to make sure that your presentation is not interrupted by a blanked display or such like.

• Powersave Apply aggressive power management methods to make sure that your machine runs as long as possible when put on battery power instead of AC power.

How about GNOME Power Manager? Do we need such options which allow user select power profiles which they like?

Sun is a large and canonical company which abides by the laws of USA and regulations of other countries in business. Therefore, we have some redundant process to go before releasing our software. Of course, every employee should understand something about law on behalf of Sun Microsystems. We also have to spend much time and energy on the process.

Recently I'm working with Brian Cameron on the export control process. This work is a bit annoying because you have to know many details about the products. For example, how does evolution use encryption algorithms? which algorithms and key size does it use etc. Maybe we have no choice except answering those questions one by one. I think I can finish them soon.

Oh, just remember, today is the birthday of jessie's father. We'll go to cellebrate it for him. Which present should I buy for him?

Recently we are going through the process of GNOEM Power Manager ARC case. Gary has asked some questions related with security and authorization. For example, how does a gconf value is managed by administrator? In fact, we never investigated similar issues before. Gary's questions make us look over those issues in GNOME desktop. For example, maybe APOC can help to configure gconf values.

I sent the question to colleagues in Ireland to get more suggestions since they are more experienced on GNOME. Brian, Darren and Matt gave us some beneficial help. But anyway, I still hope we can speed the arc process for open source projects and improve the efficiency alarmingly.