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Bug#648057: tasksel: please include laptop-mode-tools in the laptop task selection



Christian PERRIER wrote:
> So, that sumamrizes to:  in what is lmt better than pm-utils? I have
> no specific problem with either of these, but it's certainly not a
> good idea to install both..:-)

laptop-mode-tools has been considered for tasksel before; I used it for
years, and I don't think it's appropriate to install by default.

* Its primary concern is spinning down the disk. Many laptops don't have
  spinning disks.
* The first item in its FAQ is "Spinning down too many times may kill
  hard drives", and IIRC there was a big stink about this a few years
  ago. (It never killed my disk, but it did probably help it get really
  noisy due to the strain.)
* It's willing to trade off data not reaching the disk in order to keep
  it spun down. The second item in its FAQ is "If you have laptop mode
  enabled and your machine crashes, then you will lose up to
  MAX_LOST_WORK_SECONDS seconds of work." This is fine if you've chosen
  to install it, but not for something installed by default.
* syslogd's default configuration is to sync logs. This causes disks
  to spin up a lot. You really need to tune your system if you're
  using laptop-mode-tools to keep the disk spun down. (It's possible the
  debian package does something about that with lm-syslog-setup these days,
  but then iceweasel and dpkg also like to fsync these days; so does vim
  iirc..)

-- 
see shy jo

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