Ubuntu 7.04 and power saving on a laptop

[Matthew Gillen]

Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> I have an Ubuntu 7.04 laptop at home and want to disable ALL power
> saving on it.   If I leave the system alone for a few days, the hard
> drive spins down and it is nonresponsive to interactive requests, save
> for a successful ping.

This might not be useful to you, but while tinkering with Fedora 7, there's a
new applet in Gnome called "Inhibit Applet" whose purpose is to "Allow the
user to inhibit automatic power saving".

Loading the applet and doing the "About" thing yields this url:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnome-power-manager/

The applet doesn't seem to do much on my non-laptop machine, but I guess
that's to be expected. :-)

In any event, you might want to see if the gnome power manager lets you fix
the spin-down problem.

If you're more comfortable with the command line, at a much lower level (and
something I think the gnome-power-manager manages for you), sometimes the hard
drive itself can be tuned using 'hdparm', maybe something like:
 hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda # disables apm on hda

(use "hdparm -I /dev/hda" and look for a line like "Advanced power management
level: ...")

HTH,
Matt


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