No suspend on lid close

[James Wilkinson]

Artifex Maximus wrote:
> Is there any good tutorial on how to lower the power consumption of my
> netbook? I mean sysctl, proc, etc. settings.

There is a tool called powertop in the standard Fedora repos: run it
from a terminal as root. There is a tab (you get to it with the right
arrow) called tunables, which makes suggestions for saving power.

Don’t accept these suggestions blindly: it wants “Autosuspend for USB
device Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical®” on my desktop, which turns the
mouse off. I find this less than useful.

Powertop knows how to implement most of its suggestions itself, or you
can run powertop --html to output a file called PowerTOP.html, which
gives you the command lines to run. You should note that most of these
command lines will only affect the current session: you may want to
change /etc/sysctl.conf (for example) to make the results permanent.

However, you should also note that powertop suggests 
echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1.2/power/control'
to put the mouse into autosuspend mode. There’s no guarantee that the
mouse will remain at that address (because USB is like that: devices can
come and go, and that affects which device number they get), and you
could end up autosuspending something you didn’t mean to autosuspend,
like a disk.

It also loves to suggest increasing the VM writeback timeout. This means
that stuff you think you’ve written to disk may take longer to actually
get there. With a working battery, the main thing you have to worry
about there is kernel crashes (if you save something, then the kernel
crashes, you might not have your saved work on disk).

None of this is Fedora-specific, by the way.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
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