Power Management

[gary101]

Hi

We all know Puppylinux is green in that it allows older hardware to have a much longer lifespan, but how about power management? Efficient power management not only means cheaper electricity bills (especially if you run the amount of computers I do! ) but is better for the evironment too.

A while ago I came across a windows program called localcooling, http://www.localcooling.com/ which showed just how much energy your power management had saved in very clear terms. A prog like this for linux would be an excellent idea.

Are there any dotpups to use or shell scripts to run that would allow me to power off hard drives etc after a user defined period? Or is it a case of me writing my own?

I have not had a look at the localcooling forum, but if others are of the same mind, perhaps we should make them feel the need for a linux port!?

[gary101]

I emailed the good people at Localcooling and have spread the word about Puppylinux. It seems that they are working on a linux version of their program.

[PaulBx1]

See this post:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 00&t=11297

and search the forum for "hdparm" generally.

Be careful though, you may be able to shoot yourself in the foot with this command. I played with it a bit, liked the fact it made for quiet computing, but for some reason the drive came back on by itself after a while. Maybe some daemon running in the background, doing disk accesses occasionally. I don't think you are going to save much electricity though.

[brad_chuck]

Yes there is a lot that you can do to power down parts of your computer that are not needed. The first is your display. This uses the most power by far. To do this look at my post here.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 79&t=15053


Next is the hard disks. This is controlled by a program called hdparm. This you can look at the options with

Code: Select all

hdparm -h

I use this setting. -S sets the spindown time 6 is 30 s and the last part is my hard disk.

Code: Select all

hdparm -S 6 /dev/sda 

You can also step down the voltage and speed of your processor. This will help even when you are using your computer. I have a Intel Core Duo. This has two 1.66 GHz cores. Puppy does not need all that power so I just run them at 1.00 GHz and when I am compiling a kernel or something I crank them up to full speed.

See this post for more info.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=12019

Hey and buy the way this is way bettor than a windows .exe file... You can wright your own scripts to do most stuff or use ones that nice folks have shared. Nothing popping up to let you know something that you don't care about. ( if you did you would put it into an Xdialog in YOUR script............)