Things I’m not sure how to do yet:
- Adjust the brightness of the tc1100 screen in Linux
- Display xvkbd (or another on-screen keyboard) when the display has been locked via xscreensaver or KDE’s screensaver
- Make sure the ACPI thermal settings are correct
- Find a journaling filesystem that behaves well with laptops
About the ACPI settings… it seems like the fan is running more than it ought to, and also that the unit is warmer than it should be at times. Out under (from memory) /proc/acpi/thermal/THRM, I can find the current temperature and also the temperatures at which different things (fans, I guess) are supposed to be turned on. Strange thing is, that file that shows the temperature zones shows different temperature zones at different times. Also, the /proc/acpi/fan area never says that any fan is on, even when I can hear them.
Odd.
On the filesystem front — back when ext2 was about as good as it got, I used to tweak the kernel cache flushing code so that writes would only be flushed to disk every 30 minutes or so. My laptop was plenty reliable, and it would always do a sync before I’d close the lid anyway, so that saved on the disk usage. But these days, I’m not so sure how to do that, with either ext3 or reiser4. Any suggestions?
maybe laptop-mode:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/laptop_mode/
Use laptop mode to save power when working on batteries:
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/laptop-mode-tools
(see also Documentation/laptop-mode.txt in the kernel)
I just noticed that and installed it. Looks like it has some nice tweaks with ext3 and reiser3, though nothing for reiser4. Very nice. Also, powernowd looks quite spiffy as well.
I’m having issues with my display backlight never powering off (XFree DPMS will blank the screen but leave the backlight on.) Trying to track that one down yet.
Thanks.