On a laptop, I ran the powertop program (under u804) and it recommended hal-disable-polling --device /dev/scd0 to eliminate an obstacle to best power conservation.
The normal behavior is to poll for media change every 2s, which is needed for the gui to do its auto-popup magic. The idea is that polling may unnecessarily wake up an otherwise idle system and maybe there's other costs as well. OK, says me, I don't much want those auto-popup thingies anyway -- I know how (and when) to perform a mount. Arggh, I just now discover that disabling the polling also prevents detecting media when I want to write an iso to the CD. So I look for ways to fix this problem, and the only thing I find is the reversal of the hal-disable-polling operation. Now the command to do that is not guessable without reading the hal-disable-polling man page; it's: hal-disable-polling --enable-polling --device /dev/scd0 I guess I'll re-disable polling after I finish burning. It seems that there ought to be a better way. But it could just be they're still working on it? I find this > Newer SATA-based CDROM drives have the capability to notify the machine > when a CD gets inserted, making polling unnecessary. Both the kernel and > hal are currently undergoing development to detect and support this > capability, > so that polling is not needed at any time for these devices. Regards, ..jim -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
