Sunday, April 12, 2009

Fresh meat!

So I volunteered to be the new host, why me?

First off, I own one of these (2133, the 1ghz/4GB ssd), and use Ubuntu, and I've been using Linux since 1996 (Red Hat 4.02, Debian in 1999 or 2000, Ubuntu since 2006 or 2007).

I picked it up a month or so back, I wanted more that 1024x600 resolution, and to not spend much money or carry much weight, so this was it, unless I wanted to wait longer and spend more ($225 off of Craig's list, with a 16GB SDHC card, then $35 at Fry's for a 2GB of RAM).

I initially put Ubuntu 8.10 on it, had the 3D drivers working for a bit, but decided to upgrade to 9.04 beta. There are issues. I did a clean install to 9.04 beta, and that works much better. Still no 3D though. Working on suspend resume, it passes their torture test fine (SD card ends up mounted read only though), however resuming via the power switch leaves the card unmounted.

So I know what I am writing about next, getting suspend/resume I expect.

And a tip for today, enable CPU scaling.

open a command prompt,
cd /boot/grub/
back up the original (use what ever date or versioning you want)
sudo cp -p boot.lst boot.lst.20090312
edit the first line begining with "kernel" to add the following to the end:
acpi_osi="!Windows 2006"
I am not going to go into enough depth to walk someone through this who doesn't know how to edit a file as root.
My line looks like this:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=fd46592a-6dd0-4ecf-9d5b-3b71954df40f ro quiet splash acpi_osi="!Windows 2006"

Then reboot, right click on the bar at the top of the screen, pick "add to panel", add "CPU frequency scaling monitor", and then configure it.

Now your CPU speed (and thus power consumption) will vary based on how much you are making your CPU do.

Anyhow, more later.