[ltp] When/where/what for low power consumption?

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 15:38 +0100, Felix E. Klee - felix.klee@inka.de
wrote:
>  From people using a modern Thinkpad (T4x, R4x, R5x, etc.) I'd like to know:
> 
>    What commands do you use to put your system into low power consumption
>    mode, and when/where do you issue these commands (on system startup,
>    on ACPI events, etc.)?
> 
> My system is a T41 2373-3kg (Centrino chipset, Radeon 9000, Bluetooth).
> 
> -- 
> Felix E. Klee
> 

I'm using laptop-mode, which spins-down the hard disk when I'm running
on batteries. I'm not sure if it's doing anything else. It pretty much
works out of the box with debian, if you make sure the HD line in
laptop-mode.conf reads /dev/hda (it gave me errors when using the
wildcards, I suppose because /dev/hdc is a DVD). laptop-mode should be
loaded automatically on startup.

I get around 4h of battery life (t42p). I guess the new ATI driver
(which I believe does a better job at suspending) might help too.

A problem seems to be the laptop has the fan running all the time
instead of switching on at some given temperature. I know the
experimental ibm-acpi code can control the fan and some people have
created patches to turn of the fan when the readings
in /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal get too high, but I haven't tested them. That
would help a lot, I think.

Hope this helps,
Carlos