Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon experiences#
I decided to try out the latest Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu on my laptop.
While the official version will be released in october 2007, I tried the Tribe 5 release
.
What attracted me most was the latest kernel 2.6.22, with all the nice power consumption features in it. I also wanted to see what powertop had to offer.
I downloaded the CD image (see link above), and started the install on a free 19GB partition.
The first try failed because the migration-assistant failed ,see this bug report
I worked around this by starting up the installer from within a shell with ubiquity --no-migration-assistant. (I remember I had these type of problems before with migration assistent).
Now the rest of the installation went smoothless.
All hardware is properly recognized, sound, USB, also the ultrabrigth screen and the wifi-card, every just works out-of-the-box, . The Ubuntu people have done a really good job !
(I still have to get the webcam to work, that I will do later)
Desktop effects are now enabled by default, but not so extreme as in Feisty, but you can now choose between 3 levels.
I also noticed that the by default dim's to about 10% after a short period of inactivity (that's good).
The system also feels faster and more responsive, even with the desktop effects.
Powertop#
I installed powertop, and ran this a few times, and you see immediately that the screen uses the most power. Furthermore the following hints are given:
Suggestion: Enable USB autosuspend by pressing the U key or adding usbcore.autosuspend=1 to the kernel command line in the grub config Suggestion: Enable wireless power saving mode by executing the following command: iwpriv eth1 set_power 5
So I turned on wireless powersaving:
root@bismarck:~# iwlist eth1 power
eth1 Current mode:off
root@bismarck:~# iwpriv eth1 set_power 5
root@bismarck:~# iwlist eth1 power
eth1 Current mode:on
timeout:25ms
And also entered the U command and change the /boot/grub/menu.lst (added usbcore.autosuspend=1)
