posted 15 years ago
It's hard to tell from one week to the next, because there are several power management standards and most hardware manufacturers seem to implement them badly - they just barely run with Windows (and on my old Compaq laptop, not even there). There was a big stink about a month back because Foxconn - who OEMs a lot of the mass-market products, including Dell and Apple - had a customer service rep rather rudely inform someone that they didn't care that their BIOS settings were broken for Linux. But a large public outcry made them restate that idea.
Probably the first place to check is the dBus, which has been supplanting CORBA as the internal desktop interprocess medium of choice. You may also find some info on ways to hook into the power management daemon itself. On my Fedora 8 system, there's an /etc/pm directory with subdirectories for sleep, power and config and without actually RTFM'ing, I'd bet that you can place event scripts into them the same way I can for my UPS daemon for things like handling low-battery events.
On second thought, you might want to look into dBus AFTER checking out the /etc/pm features. It's easier to prototype via scripts than binary programming.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.