Right after I had had enough of Knoppix in a PMI (poor man’s install) configuration, I decided to look for something better. While Knoppix was a great beginning and an eye-opener to what could be achieved in a well-configured Linux laptop, it was not enough. It did not allow for software install (well, without a lot of difficulties anyway) and everything I worked on had to be saved onto an external USB drive.
There was no way I was going back to Mandrake 10.0 with its desktop oriented architecture. Even though Mandrake, could be configured to run well on a notebook, but it simply could not match what Windows had to offer in terms of efficiency. As common with a lot of Linux distros at the time, neither Mandrake or Knoppix really offered much in terms of power management for the notebook users. I found that with a fully charged battery (which I could get 3hrs + with on Windows XP SP2), I would be lucky to get around 1.5-2.0hrs on Linux.
Right about this time, I am not sure how, I stumbled upon Ubuntu. I think it might have been getting a little bit of coverage at that time and I somehow thought it was the possible cure to my problems with Linux. I think the first version of Ubuntu that I installed was version 5.10. Like when I installed Knoppix, Ubuntu was an eye and mind opener. I simply thought it was brilliant.
It had a great set of software and for the first time ever, I had installed a Linux distro that could almost recognise all the features of my notebook. It also auto-mounted any drives that I could plug in, including USB Flash drives and my external USB hard drives. It recognised my wireless cards, sound cards, the selectable CPU speed feature of the BIOS and just about everything else I had on the notebook. The only things that did not get recognised was the SD card slot (ENE?). This was simply great.
While everything was great, Ubuntu still seemed to have a problem with some of the power-saving features of my notebook. I partly blame this on Toshiba for making a notebook that featured proprietary hooks (DMI) for the BIOS features through which software could be used to set the level of screen brightness and other features that can normally be accessed through the function keys, as well as things such as the cooling fan.
When Ubuntu reached version 7.10 (Gutsy) I decided that it was now time to dump Windows altogether and just use Linux for my day to day computing (at least on this notebook). This proved to be quite a challenge, especially when it came to power management. Even though Linux support for notebooks had matured by this stage (Dell was offering ubuntu pre-installed on some models), there were still issues caused by the lack of transparency from the hardware vendors which prevented Linux drivers from being able to work properly with some.
To make the function buttons work (at least F7 and the screen dimming keys) I had to install the omnibook kernel module which could access the DMI interface of the BIOS to dim the LCD and to control the fan, wireless switch, etc. This was not a straight forward process. As is common with Linux distros, I had to trawl through numerous forums, blogs and other articles online to discover more information about this problem. Even though in the end I managed to install it, the official stable version of the omnibook module just would not compile on Gutsy.
To get the omnibook kernel module to work in Gutsy, first I had to switch to the Generic Kernel instead of the standard Ubuntu i386 kernel. As well as having to switch kernels, one also needs to install the kernel source (linux-source in Synaptics). With those two things done, I was then able to compile the omnibook module but there was one other catch. To get omnibook to compile on Gutsy you also had to grab the latest nightly build from CVS. To discover all this information, I had to trawl Google and the forums nightly for almost four weeks (Ok, I had to also work in between searches).
While the overall experience on Gutsy was quite pleasant and straightforward, to make a complete install that took advantage of the power management features of my notebook I had to really get my hands dirty with compiling source codes, etc. This might be fine for someone with a little bit of technical aptitude such as myself, but for a lot of other computer users out there, this could be a problem. I hope this article will help those people that have come across the same problem.
On the subject of power management on notebooks, I should also mention an excellent little tool called PowerTop. I was able to bump up my battery life from just under 3 hrs with one battery to about 6.5 hrs with two batteries, screen dimmed and powertop helping me optimise processes running on the system to minimise the power footprint of the system.
My advice is, if you are buying a new notebook and wanted to have Linux installed as your default OS, make sure you purchase it from a vendor such as Dell who will send you a completely pre-configured system from the factory.