Thinkpads Forum

Ok, i've been tinkering and I've gotten power management up on kubuntu (i switched :]) I think I've got everything covered. My x21 consumes 9-14 watts of power on average when I'm using wireless and browsing the web. Is this good? Btw my battery is down to 50% capacity since I got it last week, yay.

Heres what I did.
Installed Kubuntu.
Installed Kthinkbat, Kpowersave, removed KdePowerManager
Installed the fancontrol scripts.
Istalled Powertop
{ mouse and acpi are the top reasons for wakeups, weird no? Moving the mouse seems to start the hd and the fan sometimes, this is also strange}

Set up laptop mode.
{ A little confused by people sending 5 to /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode, mine says 2 but it appears to work. Hd still spins up a little bit but I have to hunt down whats doing it }

Enabled ac97 power save and the dirty writeback centisecs.
I also did an hpet=force on bootup but I don't know if it took. I don't see the hpet timer but I do see some cpu_hpet thinger in powertop on occasion. I also remove uhci_hcd whenever I'm on battery and that seems to help a bit.

I know I still have to figure out how to get the firmware on my DWL650 P1 to auto-load on card insertion and set up wireless to powersave.
Did I miss anything? You guys are way smarter than the people on ubunutforums. They never help with anything.

Don't think there's much you can do about mouse wakeups, it's just the way the mouse is. You can try using hotkeys to do things instead (one wakeup for a keypress vs ~100 for mouse).

Acpi wakeups are most likely coming from one of those power monitoring applets you listed (or maybe fancontrol?). They should have a polling interval, which you can set to once every 3-5 secs (sometimes it's set to once every half-second or something).

Use lm-profiler to track down stuff using the drive.

I don't think HPET will work on an X21. It wasn't officially supported in hardware until chipset ICH6 (T43/R52 & newer).

Not sure about the wireless thing, but you can probably start looking in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.

/etc/pcmcia/wireless doesn't exist. All I have is hostap_cs.conf in there. I dont think I can just throw prism2_srec commands in there, can I? Thanks for all the help!

Noblunts wrote:/etc/pcmcia/wireless doesn't exist. All I have is hostap_cs.conf in there. I dont think I can just throw prism2_srec commands in there, can I? Thanks for all the help!

Try creating an executable script called /etc/hotplug/net.agent with the commands you want in it.

nope, did not work.

So I've dug up a 16-bit card and tried this out. No, I don't understand how this system works apparently. They look like they're using udev to manage this sort of stuff nowadays. But copying the net.agent script to /lib/udev/ didn't work... so I did this, and it probably isn't how it's supposed to be done but it works:

Install ifplugd

Edit /etc/default/ifplugd and add your device (eth0, eth1 or whatever) to HOTPLUG_DEVICES

Edit /lib/udev/ifplugd.agent, and add whatever commands you want at the beginning (after the "#!/bin/sh" of course).

I told it to create some random file, and it did so when I plugged the card in. Oh, and I'm guessing you need to restart ifplugd to apply new settings.

Cool! It works, THANKS! I've also noticed that the screen is still on displaying stuff in suspend. It goes off when I close the lid. Its not wasting any power?

In suspend? That's odd. Then again I don't have an X21 so I don't know if it's normal.

Make sure the LCD is totally off (it can still be on even with the light off).

nope, not going off.
I tried adding a new script to suspend.d with the command
vbetool dpms off and it won't execute it.