Lack of results

So I fiddled around with … a few different installations. 32-bit Hardy (effectively the same) and OpenSUSE 10.3 (which didn’t support the tablet as well) to be specific, and the installation over the net is almost painless. Note to self: This is why you ALWAYS make a separate partition for /home: so that you have somewhere to put your junk that needs to stick around when you reinstall the OS.

Looking at Linux distrubutions also makes me feel old.  “Hey, look, there’s Slackware.  I installed that off floppies back in 1993.”

Basically, it seems that my CPU, in its current state, really isn’t the major source of power loss.

So there is some more stuff I can try. There’s the tpfand fan control daemon to let you fiddle with the speed settings on the fan, as the hardware currently seems to be operating in the “full blast or off” setting. This will take some work, as I’d need to research things carefully and set up a profile for my own system (no other X61 tablet users have bothered).

There’s also trying to get my hard drive to spin down while off power. The load cycle bug (still annoying) should only be a problem if the system keeps actively kicking the hard drive into action; if we can get it to stop that it should actually qualify as desirable behavior to spin down so aggressively.  This involves learning more about Unix, and specifically what kinds of daemons will keep the drive busy (syslogd, etc).

There’s always a dangerous temptation to fiddle with the kernel, too, at the very least recompiling with some system-specific options.  Also not something for an hour’s work, but at the very least it would be nice to personalize the 2.6.24 kernel that comes with Ubuntu, or see if I can get the newest stable kernel running.