Programming gnome power management

Question

I'm a Linux and gnome user, and I'm currently depending mainly on a notebook, and not surprisingly, I am not satisfied with the power quandary, so i recurred to power-management tools available for my system (currently Linux Mint 11), which is a really simple gui (gnome-power-preferences) with really few really basic features, which I'd love to expand.

I do not intend to work at low level features of power management, the states the are currently available are enough (suspend, hibernate, shutdown, do-nothing, monitor-brightness, downspin-hd, etc...), what I really need is a better way to create conditions in setting those states, which is, in the standard native tool, time and lid-closing, that's extremely limited.

So the question, I want to know what are my options to create scripts in any language(I'm willing to learn if i don't already know) that allow me to take a wider control of power-management conditions, i was think of(my possible settings):

• down-spin disks immediately after lid closing and cut connection after n seconds.
• don't cut connection after n seconds of lid-closing if bandwidth use is bigger than x bps
• provide more statistical tools based on programs using, programs in background... services, etc.
• create, save and load profiles that would automatically set monitor brightness, sound volume, wireless power, resource limits, etc... ex: 'college_ba.pp', 'default_ac.pp'...
• brightness adjusting based on webcam shot illumination.
• suspend or hibernate based on webcam shots without face for n seconds
• etc

It may sound impossible and hard, I do not intend to have these stuff ready-to-use, as I said, i intend to use as much manual effort as needed, I just want to avoid low-level with existing libraries and tools, as much as possible, and i wish everyone to share information about any library, tool or project that comes to mind and deal with any subset of these things I've cited in this question.

This is a thing that i want from a long time, and just now i realize that this community could help me wide my options. My English is horrible I know, i learned online. I'm familiar with C++, C, Python and lately bash scripts. Thanks.

Answer 1

Your next step is to learn D-Bus, since most of the tools, both user and system, communicate using it.