Power Mgt on Laptop

[Jeff Coppock <jcoppock1@comcast.net>]

Lately, I've been working on making my laptop as efficient on power as
possible.  

Dell Latitude C610, BIOS version A16, Testing release.

There is a lot of information out there on this subject and I've
accomplished quite a bit on the system:

1.  I mount my EXT3 partitions with noatime
2.  I have /tmp mounting in memory with tmpfs
3.  I adjusted syslog-ng logging with the sync() option to buffer 5
lines before writing to file
4.  I do not use swap since I have enough memory to handle all my needs

But, in spite of this I simply cannot get the HDD to spin down with KDE
running.  If I exit to KDM, it works just fine.   With KDE running, I've
tried stopping all the daemons I can and still no joy.

I've tried to see what was accessing files/dirs using the following
script:

#!/bin/bash
echo
echo "Finding new files and dirs 5 minutes old."
echo
echo "Files..."
find / -mount -type f -amin -5
find /usr -mount -type f -amin -5
find /home -mount -type f -amin -5
echo
echo "Directories..."
find / -mount -amin -5
find /usr -mount -amin -5
find /home -mount -amin -5

I can get KDE to a point where nothing KDE-related shows up, but still
no joy.  

I've also found that noflushd doesn't work by testing it against hdparm
-S, which does work.  So I'm using hdparm now.

I'm thinking now that it's hopeless with KDE running, that I won't be
able to read email or other doc's offline without the HDD spinning and
burning battery.  If anyone has idea's or suggestions to help me out,
I'd really appreciate it.

thanks,
jc

-- 
Jeff Coppock		Systems Engineer
Diggin' Debian		Admin and User