I call lolerskates

May 23, 2008 in Fedora, Kicking My Ass, Linux | 11 comments

I lost power last night and I finally decided it was time to buy a UPS. I’ve never actually owned one.

I go out to the store this morning and buy one, bring it home, plug it in and I decide to try and figure out what kinds of loads various things sitting on my desk create. I have a little Verizon router for FIOS – it uses about 5 watts. The external USB hard drive about 8 watts. The mac mini that I have running Fedora 8 on it uses about 7 watts. Not too bad, all things considered.

So I decided to drop the router and the drive and find out how much the mini drew when it was running and how much it drew when it was suspended. So I unplugged them and then suspended the mini. The power went from 7 watts to 10. Huh? I started the mini back up and the power usage dropped back to 7. Suspend, it jumps back up to 10. That’s right. My mini running Fedora 8 uses more power when it’s suspended than when it’s sitting at an idle desktop.

I have a new rule. Richard Hughes isn’t allowed to complain about anything Firefox-related until my computers running Linux use less power suspended than when they are sitting at an idle desktop.

  1. Richard Hughes’s avatar

    Richard Hughes on May 23, 2008 at 11:34 am

    Heh, thanks. It’s Hughes, not Hugues, but that’s a tiny detail. With your mini, it’s very closed hardware, but it’s probably something as trivial as not powering down a USB device or keeping a SATA link up. Bugzilla it (cc me and mjg59), and we will see what we can do.

  2. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on May 23, 2008 at 12:09 pm

    Thanks, I fixed the name. I always get shit like that wrong. :)

  3. Jeff Walden’s avatar

    Jeff Walden on May 23, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    Haha, nice snark at the end there. :-)

  4. Shawn Wilsher’s avatar

    Shawn Wilsher on May 23, 2008 at 4:10 pm

    Some of the comments on that post you linked to make me sad :(

  5. Jordan Crouse’s avatar

    Jordan Crouse on May 23, 2008 at 4:36 pm

    Richard is right; when the hardware is that closed, the open source folks are inevitably going to miss that sekret bit to turn off a bus or device. Next time buy from somebody more committed to teaching people how to actually use their hardware (insert shameless plug for the _other_ x86 vendor).

  6. Mr Jones’s avatar

    Mr Jones on May 23, 2008 at 7:49 pm

    The Linux hackers would have reverse engineered your proprietary Apple hardware, but there was an intimidating looking EULA forbidding it…

  7. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on May 23, 2008 at 8:50 pm

    So I understand that it’s not the most awesome hardware in the world. It’s _mostly_ Intel top to bottom except for that Atheros chipset and whatever Apple did to the ACPI tables. Except that I still haven’t seen hardware that does work top to bottom.

    In theory there’s the Dell XPS laptops that work. But I keep hearing that there’s still stuff that doesn’t work there (like sound.) Stephen O’Grady tried to run Linux on his X300 and had constant sound problems with it – recompiling drivers and whatnot.

    So this still feels like blaming the victim and/or debugging the blame instead of the problem. (Not entirely, but still.) When are we going to have fully supported hardware that I _know_ will work? Last time I had working software + hardware together was the X31 with FC5 on it. It’s all been downhill since then.

  8. Andres Salomon’s avatar

    Andres Salomon on May 23, 2008 at 11:23 pm

    Linux support for my x40 is pretty great.. Unfortunately, it’s quite old (I’m on my 2nd battery, my 4th or 5th power cable, and I have huge cracks all over the display). I’m dreading having to find a new laptop that fits my criteria..

  9. Basil Mohamed Gohar’s avatar

    Basil Mohamed Gohar on May 24, 2008 at 4:54 pm

    I think it is hard to avoid a bit of lag on the support side as long as hardware vendors stay hostile or ambivalent towards free software developers. I have an older Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop and nearly everything, from the sound card through to the Firewire port, are supported very well (at least under Fedora).

    On a new laptop, I don’t know what to expect, though, because the hackers are just in a bind trying to poke the hardware to figure out what it does, rather than working with the vendors, who offer few or no channels of cooperation.

  10. Casey’s avatar

    Casey on May 27, 2008 at 11:39 am

    Chris, that’s an impressively low power consumption; is that your day-to-day rig? When you engage your armada of hand held devices what’s the total?

  11. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on May 27, 2008 at 12:35 pm

    It’s just a mini. And I think the baseline number is too low – should be more like 25 watts to run a mini.