I call lolerskates
by Christopher Blizzard
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.
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.
Thanks, I fixed the name. I always get shit like that wrong. :)
Haha, nice snark at the end there. :-)
Some of the comments on that post you linked to make me sad :(
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).
The Linux hackers would have reverse engineered your proprietary Apple hardware, but there was an intimidating looking EULA forbidding it…
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.
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..
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.
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?
It’s just a mini. And I think the baseline number is too low – should be more like 25 watts to run a mini.