"Marc A. Ohmann" <marc at ds6.net> wrote: > > Has anybody had any luck getting decent battery life from linux laptops? > I can never get the hd to spin down for any length of time because of > all the random fs activity especially on /var. Without disabling > syslogd, are there any solutions to getting the hd to spin down? I haven't worked with this on laptops, but I have a system sitting in a corner that I used to spin down the hard drive on (the drive occasionally makes nasty noises). It mostly just takes up space (and occasionally acts as a terminal when I have to SSH into my box to kill a dead X server...), so I tried setting the hard drive to power down. It worked pretty well until I installed an NTP daemon on it, which would write clock drift calculations to disk every ~15 minutes. I haven't played with it, but I could probably just fall back to running ntpdate in a cron job every hour or three.. Other than that, the disk would almost always be spun down. I'm curious why your syslog daemon is apparently writing to disk fairly often. That would indicate to me that you have a lot of other daemons floating around spitting out debugging info and whatnot. You could try reducing the amount of stuff that gets logged by modifying syslog.conf, or (probably better) disable or remove the daemons producing the log messages in the first place. I'd go around and disable unnecessary daemons (you don't usually need apache on your laptop, for instance..). -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ The sky is falling...no, / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ I'm tipping over backwards. \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20011206/7b7d6cd9/attachment.pgp