Recently I have purchased a nice little notebook from Fujitsu-Siemens, Amilo Si1520 model.
After deleting M$ Vista and installing Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), the time has come to tweak few things here and there. One thing that comes to mind is power saving, since battery time on this model is about 3:30 which is not much.
I’ve installed these two packages: laptop-mode and laptop-mode-tools and tweaked laptop-mode.conf a bit, but still I was not satisfied with hard disk power management. I have changed power settings and loudnes settings, enabled write wache and enabled sleep mode all with one command:
sudo hdparm -B128 -M128 -S60 -W1 /dev/sda
Still I noticed har drive was often awakened from sleep state. One thing I had to uninstall was hddtemp, since it wakes up the drive every minute or so to read the temperature.
I have also edited these hard drive settings into /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf, since this laptop has serial ata drive it tends to get little hot, so these settings help in that area too. allthough it doesn’t give full performance it is still good, quiet and cold enough to tolerate.
Also one nice feature would be to mount your /tmp into RAM, so that your apps would not wake up HDD to write. You can do this by editing your /etc/fstab file by adding:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=100m,mode=1777 0 0
This will create /tmp folder of 100MB in your RAM memory.