Greetings all-

I'm hoping to get a little bit of clarification on how I ought to be configuring power management. Perhaps it goes without saying, but my interest stems from suspending/resuming and extending the battery life of my laptop. Additionally, I'm not asking for configuration help, but rather asking about methodology and philosophy!

From what I gather there seems to be a few different methods of power management, including kde's power manager, acpid, and pm-utils. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the purpose for all of these, but it seems that they all accomplish basically the same thing, with the exception that acpid also handles other hardware events. Are these all going to stay around? Is there a preferred management method?

Up till now, I've been using acpid events to trigger scripts, but while doing some related reading I saw something that said that pm-utils was the preferred way to handle power management (I don't remember where). Should I start trying to use pm-utils hooks instead?

If the answer is that acpid is still the way to go (or an acceptable way to go), then I have a follow-up question. Should I be adding entries to the acpi_handler.sh script or creating my own scripts in /etc/acpi/actions ? Seeing that the "default" entry in /etc/events sends everything to acpi_handler.sh suggests to me that I should, but I think I've seen some examples of other slackers using individual scripts for events. Is it just a question of personal taste, or is one method preferred over the other?

Thanks!
--Chad

They are not different methods. They are just different software layers. The philosophy you are looking for is called "laptop-mode tools", maybe.