Re: useful laptop specific apps?
>
> On 30-Aug-2000 Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> > Hey all. I have gotten my new Sony Vaio all set up nicely with X and
> > sound and PCMCIA networking and stuff like that. It really wasn't too
> > hard. What I'm wondering now is what apps are available to make mobile
> > life easier. I've installed things like wmbattery to monitor battery
> > status and stuff. Is there more than that? Since the machine is
> > mobile it will be moving between networks often (sometimes with dhcp,
> > sometimes with static addresses). What do you folks find helpful in
> > this situation?
>
> apt-get install task-laptop # yes, I maintain it (-:
And we all want to know what kind of beer you like to drink so we can buy
you one.
> I am also working on a re-write if divine. divine determines which
> network you are plugged into and sets you up based on configuration it
> was given ahead of time.
>
> joeyh packaged up noflushd. This causes linux to hold flushs to disk until
> absolutely necessary, so your disk will stay idle all the time. helps battery
> life. I have not added it to task-laptop because I am not convinced it is
> safe enough for me to force every laptop user to use it. I am talking to
> the author and the maintainer of apm about this.
It's certainly made one or two systems in my care happier, but I haven't
played with it broadly enough to see any failures related to it.
In the specific-config category, setting up a runlevel for "low power" running
as few daemons as you can .. only a couple of getty sessions in inittab ..
can be worthwhile to stretch a battery a bit. Also configuring syslog to
keep its greasy fingers off your disk except for things you explicitly care
about (my fave, dump the intermediate stuff to a spare console) helps a lot.
btw most of the howto's which are interesting to laptop users have seen
recent updates, both since debian's packaging, and since linuxdoc.org last
got off their duff and chased them down. Getting local copies of such
internet documents as you enjoy referring to is probably worthwhile.
* Heather * star@ many places...
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