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Topic: Forcing acpi? Hoping to improve battery life..., Triple battery life in Wolvix vs DSL

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yangmusa

Group: Members
Posts: 54
Joined: Aug. 2007

Posted: Sep. 14 2007,18:55

I love DSL, but I confess that my curiosity for different Linux distributions led me to install Wolvix Cub 1.1 too (dual booting now). And I discovered something interesting! Although my hardware is too slow to run Wolvix as fast as it runs DSL, my battery life is tripled (or more, still waiting..) when running Wolvix!

I'm guessing it might be to do with Wolvix running acpi, rather than apm? I removed both noapm and noacpi from the cheat codes, to let DSL choose. Although it isn't listed, can I use "acpi" as a cheat code to force it on?

On the negative side, with Wolvix & acpi - when I press the power button it initiates shutdown. On DSL, pressing the power button initiates hardware suspend. I love suspend! No more waiting for start up! So if I had to choose between great battery life, or suspend... oh, I don't know..

roberts

Group: Members
Posts: 4983
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Sep. 14 2007,21:13

The answer depends on how you are booting DSL.
If you have a boot prompt then

boot: dsl acpi=force

If no boot prompt then how are booting and how did you install?
What boot loader did you choose? It could be lilo.conf or menu.lst, or syslinux.cfg or isolinux.cfg or pendrive.bat, etc...

yangmusa

Group: Members
Posts: 54
Joined: Aug. 2007

Posted: Sep. 14 2007,21:38

I've got a frugal install, booting using GRUB.

I guess I can add acpi=force at the end of the list of kernel parameters in the relevant menu.lst entry? Will give it a try after work and see what happens.

yangmusa

Group: Members
Posts: 54
Joined: Aug. 2007

Posted: Sep. 15 2007,19:31

I used acpi=force and it booted with acpi. It looks like battery life will be extended too, so already this experiment has been somewhat successful!

Few questions though:
1) Torsmo no longer shows any info about the battery - do I need to change any settings?

2) Suspend to ram no longer works, it used to sleep on pressing the power button. Now it does nothing. I've been reading the acpi documentation but following their advice doesn't work.

Code Sample

echo S3 > /proc/acpi/sleep

Gives no errors, but nothing happens either. Still nothing if a sudo this command. When I check the contents of sleep, it remains unchanged:

Code Sample

cat /proc/acpi/sleep
S0 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5

Ideas?