powertop & disable cdrom polling

I installed a nice tools called powertop to have a clue
what was consuming the most battery waking up the cpu in sleep times as i am not really doing heavy work on it.

powertop gives hints:

Suggestion: Enable the CONFIG_NO_HZ kernel configuration option.
This option is required to get any kind of longer sleep times in the CPU.

Suggestion: Disable 'hal' from polling your cdrom with:
hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom 'hal' is the component that auto-opens a
window if you plug in a CD but disables SATA power saving from kicking in.

so I disabled polling the dvd rom doing the following:

root@debian:~/apps# hal-get-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_PIONEER_DVD_RW_DVR_K17RS --key storage.automount_enabled_hint
true

root@debian:~/apps# hal-set-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_PIONEER_DVD_RW_DVR_K17RS --key storage.automount_enabled_hint --bool false

I have yet to see if it gets any better, or maybe the differences a not big so that I would even notice it...

then i restarted dbus

Orbicam down !

Finally I could make the orbicam work. Guess what?
it flips the image as you turn the camera around !!! :D


root@debian:~# lsusb
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 5986:0100
This is a usb 2.0 orbicam.

I tried the gspca driver but couldnt get it to work.
So I read about uvc video and everything works out of debian testing repositories.

Install the kernel module
root@debian:~# m-a a-i linux-uvc

and then
root@debian:~# modprobe uvcvideo

then check dmesg to see if everything went ok.
You should an output like this if it is:

uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB2.0 Camera (5986:0100)
usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)

then start luvcvideo and have fun ;-)

The bad thing about uvc video is that it uses a very low resolution thus not using the whole potential of the cam. The GUI to the cam isnt that good either.

Current amsn version works allright with the cam, although it is still quite buggy.

AMD Frequency Scaling

The Amd Turion 64 X2 can run at various speeds and it can scale up or down dinamically.
This primarly a power saving and power consumption optimization.
This charts shows the available frequencies this processor can run with.

analyzing CPU 0:
driver: powernow-k8
CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0 1
hardware limits: 800 MHz - 1.80 GHz
available frequency steps: 1.80 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 800 MHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 1.80 GHz.
The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 800 MHz.

New Linux Kernels should have this kernel module install by default, but old ones like mine was had to be recompiled to include the module.
Amd also provides a Power Monitor and some cpu frequency governors by default.
http://www.amd.com/la-es/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_14098,00.html


I mostly use ondemand, that is it scales up or down according to the needs for processing the system has. For instance it is running at 800 Mhz as i write this but it quickly steps up to 1.8 when i put some source to compile.

Powersave uses the lowest power consuming option and performance the highest.

You can use the cpufreq-utils in the debian repos to find out more about your own processor.

It considerably reduces battery life when you have this daemon running so if you use an old kernel (< 2.6.16), you might have to update or recompile.

Setting up Wifi

Well first of all I wanted to get the wifi working... so I could go around the house working on the rest of the hardware...so here is the guide

Installing the Wifi driver
using Ndiswrapper and the Windows firmware

The card:
marcel@debian:~$ lspci
04:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)

I used the ndiswrapper solution with the Windows firmware cause there isnt any drivers for linux at least at this time.Basically ndiswrapper wraps around the firmware to make it work on linux...
I got ndiswrapper from the debian repos.

root@debian:~$ aptitude install ndiswrapper

install the kernel modules using the module asistant
marcel@debian:~$ m-a -i ndiswrapper
then download the Windows driver and load it

marcel@debian:~$ ndiswrapper -a devid driver
use your devid number as it is shown on "lspci -n"

marcel@debian:~$ ndiswrapper -i bcmXXXX.inf

it should look like this if everything went ok
root@debian:~# ndiswrapper -l
installed drivers:
bcmwl5 driver installed, hardware (14E4:4328) present

Then load the module:

root@debian:~$ modprobe ndiswrapper

check dmesg to see if everything went ok

You should now have interface wlan0 on the output of ifconfig

This are the versions of ndiswrapper i Used and got working

ii ndiswrapper-source 1.49-1 Source for the ndiswrapper Linux kernel modu
ii ndiswrapper-utils 1.1-5 Userspace utilities for ndiswrapper
ii ndiswrapper-utils-1.1 1.1-5 Userspace utilities for ndiswrapper
ii ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 1.28-1 Userspace utilities for the ndiswrapper linu

I will now go for the ATI drivers cause i want Direct Rendering = Yes !!!

This is the hardware

Step 2
This is the output of lspci, a good start to know what your hardware is before goinng looking for drivers. Now thats what i am gonna do...

marcel@debian:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI-X Root Port
00:04.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:05.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 5a37
00:12.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 4379 Serial ATA Controller (rev 80)
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller (rev 80)
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller (rev 80)
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller (rev 80)
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 83)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller ATI (rev 80)
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SB450 HDA Audio (rev 01)
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge (rev 80)
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge (rev 80)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M52 [ATI Mobility Radeon X1300]
04:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)
06:01.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
06:04.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB-712/4 Cardbus Controller (rev 10)
06:04.1 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc ENE PCI Memory Stick Card Reader Controller (rev 01)
06:04.2 Generic system peripheral [0805]: ENE Technology Inc ENE PCI Secure Digital Card Reader Controller (rev 01)
06:04.3 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc: (rev 01)
06:04.4 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc Unknown device 0551 (rev 01)

Here is the laptop

Well some time ago I got my first laptop. It is an Acer Travelmate 5510 (5514WLMI)


Here are the specs:
AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56
ATI Mobility Radeon X1300
1 GB RAM DDR2
160 GB hard-drive
DVD Multi Dual Layer Writer
wifi 802.11 b/g
15.4 LCD screen

First thing I did when I got this new laptop was make a nice cup of coffee and put a Debian 4.0 dvd on the dvd-drive. After the life cd booted I formated the hard-drive to get rid of Windows Vista. I barely booted Vista a couple of times, mostly to make sure the hardware worked properly
I will be writing about the process of converting this Acer Travalmate laptop to GNU/Linux in the following posts.