Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu [LWN.net]

Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 9, 2007 18:19 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778)
In reply to: Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu by lorien420
Parent article: Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

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.

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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?