KDE Tip for SLED10

Team Mobile
In Nuremberg, Novell has a sub-team within SUSE called “Team Mobile.” Team Mobile deals with solving laptop issues that hold back Linux desktop adoption for mobile users, as well as dealing with PDA issues.

Erin Quill and I interviewed Holger Macht and Timo Hoenig about what they put into SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, and what they hope to get done before the next release of openSUSE. The interview will be up on Novell Open Audio within a week or two (after production editing is done, and perhaps we get a couple other SUSE interviews out).

The KDE trick
Team Mobile told us about a cool feature that is likely not documented. In KDE on SLED10, when you mouse over the Kpowersave screen resolution applet’s icon, you can use the mouse wheel to increase or decrease the screen brightness. (You may need to add the applet to the KDE interface on SLED10.)

Not a big deal? Well, according to Holger, dimming your LCD panel can extend the charge life of a laptop battery by about 40%, so it’s the biggest battery hog over which we have some control. In both GNOME and KDE, SLED10 uses some smart algorithms to dim or brighten the screen according to whether on battery or AC power. But sometimes when you need to briefly brighten the screen while on batterery, this gives a quick way to bring the brightness up and back down.

So that’s kind of a cool feature. For those who thought SLED10 introduced innovations only on GNOME, you won’t find this one there. Team Mobile probably won’t have it for GNOME until openSUSE hits v.10.2.