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Laptops, power management, and UbuntuLaptops, power management, and UbuntuPosted Nov 9, 2007 16:08 UTC (Fri) by lorien420 (guest, #44036)In reply to: Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu by kevinbsmith Parent article: Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu
I've never read these comments as user-hostile. The distro saying we won't touch these settings isn't telling you they don't care, it's saying that it doesn't seem like something we should do. Maybe if they find the magic number that everybody loves this won't be a problem. Right now they have the people with dying laptop hard drives screaming at them. If they tweak the number, maybe it will silence those people but anger some other user? Maybe the number they pick will be wrong and instantly kill the hard drive? The right answer isn't clear, which is why they're falling back on, "We won't touch it unless you explicitly tell it to."
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Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu Posted Nov 9, 2007 18:19 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link] Let's look at the two issues seperately. As far as I can tell, none of the distros have offered any official advice about how to deal with this problem. That is a "we don't care" attitude. If the distros won't help, who will? The minimum I would find acceptable is to advise users that there may be a problem, and suggest possible things the user can do to mitigate. If you can point me to anything like that, please do. I have not yet found any official (or unofficial) step-by-step instructions for things to try. Vague advice like "use hdparm" or "turn on laptop mode" don't count. It would be even better if they could find a way to "fix" it in software. The comment posted above was, in my opinion, hostile to users. Notably: "If your hard disk dies within the warranty period, demand a replacement. If it doesn't, what are you worrying about?" Other forum posts elsewhere have been even worse. There *is* a problem. We as a community *need* to find a solution. As I said, that might just be providing step-by-step instructions so each user can manually tweak their machine to their own preferences. And letting folks know they need to do that to avoid losing their drives. We don't even have that yet.
Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu Posted Nov 9, 2007 19:17 UTC (Fri) by lorien420 (guest, #44036) [Link] While we may disagree on the "user-hostility" idea, I think you're definitely right that people need to be informed about potential problems like this no matter whose fault it really is. Actually, I would say that's a general problem. As a community we have lots of resources to find out about the problems and do our own sifting for solutions, but it seems like this process is sometimes unnecessary. In this case for this bug, there's actually a metric for when the distro can guess that something is going wrong (e.g., check every hour to see if the spin count is increasing at an inappropriately high rate). Unfortunately, there aren't that many tools to get this sort of information, at least not for a desktop distribution. I think it would be interesting to see an interface along the lines of Fedora's SELinux Troubleshooter for things like this. Maybe every hour a cron job starts up to check for common errors with metrics like this. If there is one, an icon displays in the task bar to tell you about it and point you towards some proposed fixes with all the requisite warnings about changing your hardware defaults?
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