Laptops :: Forcing acpi? Hoping to improve battery life...



Quote (roberts @ Sep. 15 2007,14:13)
For advanced acpi functions you need to look at the example scripts in /opt/acpi/actions and modify to suit your needs. Then start the daemon acpid

I don't seem to have the acpi deamon installed. Is it a MyDsl package? And if so, I can't find it under MyDSL browser > System.

Also, I checked the scripts. The powerbutton script initiates reboot, the lib script initiates shutdown - neither initiate suspend to ram.

If I could find the right commands to initiate suspend to ram, then I could rewrite the scripts. But like I wrote earlier, the instructions from the ACPI documentation don't work on DSL. Could be there's more to be learned from the docs, but the instructions given didn't list any ifs/buts/caveats or alternative suggestions.
acpid was added to DSL v3.4 see notes.html section

Use the boot option "acpid"

or the typical

# /etc/init.d/acpid start
On my laptop, the biggest power saving comes from slowing the Intel Speedstop processor down - in the 2.6.x kernel, this can be done automatically using cpufreqd (I get about twice the battery life with dsl-n as compared with dsl).

After this, the next biggest power saving comes from spinning down the hd, again in 2.6.x this can be done automatically with laptop-mode-tools.

I have tried suspend/sleep on 2.4.x with no sucess at all - on 2.6.x I can suspend, but my laptop never wakes up...

I think you're going to be relatively limited in 2.4.x, but there is plenty of information out there via google.
Quote (yangmusa @ Sep. 15 2007,05:31)
I used acpi=force and it booted with acpi. It looks like battery life will be extended too, so already this experiment has been somewhat successful!

Few questions though:
1) Torsmo no longer shows any info about the battery - do I need to change any settings?

2) Suspend to ram no longer works, it used to sleep on pressing the power button. Now it does nothing. I've been reading the acpi documentation but following their advice doesn't work.

Code Sample
echo S3 > /proc/acpi/sleep


Gives no errors, but nothing happens either. Still nothing if a sudo this command. When I check the contents of sleep, it remains unchanged:

Code Sample
cat /proc/acpi/sleep
S0 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5


Ideas?

Check where your battery info is stored when using acpi. The version of torsmo currently in DSL can only access battery info in directories proc/acpi/battery/BAT0(or 1,2,3,.....) Version 0.18, which I think Robert is going to put in future releases, can cope with other directory names (the Toshiba Libretto 100CT uses a directory called MBAT). I haven't had much success with symlinks to to correct this. The binary of v0.18 that I use is at users.tpg.com.au/cramond/torsmo.tar.gz. This contains a unc file so you can use it to overwrite the existing version of torsmo for the time being.
andrewb's torsom v0.18 will be included in the next release of DSL both 3.4.3 and 4.0.
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