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Incremental Improvements

November 25, 2006 ( geek )

laptop_stickersI fool around a lot with my old Dell Latitude CPi laptop. It's from 1998/99 or so (I bought it used at Agillion's dot-bomb auction in 2000). I run kUbuntu Linux on it, and use it as my travel laptop. It doesn't have much hard drive space, and very little memory, but it's light and has good battery life.

It's also a good learning tool. I find silly problems that I want to solve, and it lets me make progress. My recent mucking with it has been around general usage improvements, improving my usage of its limited memory while also optimizing for my personal usage. PArt of this was getting standby finally working (it takes forever and a day to reboot, and it's Linux, so doesn't really need rebooting like Windows does). Suspend I got working last year, and recent kernel upgrades made it so that I didn't have to much with the wireless card before suspending. Standby nevertheless wouldn't work right unless I deactivated the wireless card (it's old, an Orinoco silver, and doesn't have good power management).

Anyhow, I found a workaround; drop this script into your /etc/apm/scripts.d directory:

#!/bin/sh
# apmd proxy script to power down wireless cards
# that don't support iwconfig [interface] txpower off
# like old Orinoco silver/gold cards
case "$1,$2" in
suspend,*) ifdown eth0 ;;
standby,*) ifdown eth0 ;;
resume,suspend) ifup eth0 ;;
resume,standby) ifup eth0 ;;
esac

Then symlink to it from the resume and suspend directories (follow the permissions and patterns in there, I presume the numbers affect ordering of the script executions). Works like a charm!

UPDATE The ifdown/ifup on suspend screwed with my suspend working; removing that seems to have fixed it. Things is weird that way.

Posted by griffjon at November 25, 2006 02:49 PM

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