power saving(mobile-update daemon,...)

[Werner Heuser <wehe@snafu.de>]

Hi,

recently Stephane Bortzmeyer announced 'mobile-update'
as an unofficial Debian package. I have installed the
package. And purged it, to learn more about
the 'dpkg-divert' mechanism. It restored the former
'update' package without any problems. Thanks Stephane.

But still I have some questions:

1) How do I know 'mobile-update' works?
- 'man 8 update' didn't make this clear to me
- /usr/doc/update is empty and /usr/doc/mobile-update is nearly empty
- 'kupdate' is running, has this to do with 'update'? and
  couldn't find a manpage
- probably I should have looked up kernel sources, but
  currently I had to remove them, my hd is full

2) How can I measure the result in powersaving easily? 
Maybe I can 
- refresh the battery as much as possible
- start an infinite benchmark test (which one?)
- use an 'uptime' daemon to measure the time until
  the machines goes down
but this seems to long for me. Is there another approach?

I want to measure other power saving techniques, too:

- hdparm is a Linux IDE disk utility that lets you set
spin-down timeouts and other disk parameters.

- mount with 'noatime' option, thanks to Sean 'Shaleh' Perry

- some other techniques I have described in the Laptop-HOWTO,
  and there are probably more

Cheers
:-> werner