Found some notes about Linux on Laptops that rang true to my experience. Under XP I am getting nearly a full day of usage (off and on) on a single battery charge. On my Presario running Linux with no ACPI control I got 45 mn. With Linux I've read that ACPI control is incomplete and that HD control is done with a separate program.
Anybody have measurements on how long a battery charge lasts using Linux on a laptop? What I conclude from reading this is that Linux control of ACPI ... well ... er ... sucks right now. I'll continue to research this, but if anyone has information to the contrary I'd like to see it. Excerpts from http://www.freelabs.com/~whitis/linux/xf335/ below: Notes on Resizing XP partition There are no free tools to resize an NTFS partion. There are several commercial programs which can do that. I chose instead to delete the partition, recreate it as a smaller FAT32 partition, make it primary, format it, and run the HP reinstall in "Restore C: only" mode. Note that the HP reinstall will trash any linux partion at hda2 - you need to make windows partition 2. Of course, the best thing is to delete eXtra Pain entirely. MM: I was following up a suggestion to use Knoppix and one of the OSS partition resizers. The information above seems to be correct given what is written at www.ranish.net/part. Support for NTFS in OSS and shareware is experimental or embryonic. Battery Life Battery life is very poor at the moment, about 1-1/4 hours. This is because we don't have control over many of the power management features. The screen backlight is at high intensity all the time; close the lid to conserve power. ACPI ACPI stands for Advanced Configuratin and Power Interface Specification. New computers do not have a traditional BIOS which allows you to configure the machine. Instead, the ACPI bios gives the operating system control over the machine configuration. About all the user has control over is the boot order and even then we still don't have a decent boot loader in the bios. Another acronym used is OSPM, or Operating System Power Management; this is code in the operating system which communicates with the ACPI bios through the ACPI Driver/AML Interpretter. ASL, which stands for ACPI Source Language, is compiled into AML, which stands for ACPI Machine Language. DSDT stand for Differentiaded System Description Table which is basically a table describing the system configuration. Linux support of ACPI is pretty sketchy at the moment. ACPI support under windoze is pretty sketchy too. Basic stuff like battery monitoring works but if you want to configure your EPP/ECP parallel port into EPP mode instead of ECP, you are out of luck. -- Mike Mueller 324881 (08/20/2003) Make clockwise circles with your right foot. Now use your right hand to draw the number "6" in the air. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
