----------  Forwarded Message from Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <"Boyd Stephen Smith 
Jr." <bss03@...>>:  ----------

Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Wich kernel to use for a laptop.
Date: Sunday 21 November 2004 12:20 am
From: "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <bss03@...>
To: gentoo-user@g.o

On Saturday 20 November 2004 10:43 pm, Random <Random <cja2@...>> wrote:
> My question is: is there a kernel patchset designed for laptop users, or
> is there one that works specially fine with them?

Ever since I installed gentoo on my laptop I've been running
gentoo-dev-sources, without any additional patches.  I did try out
mm-sources, so I could get reiser4 support, but resizing reiser4 filesystems
is not implemented (at ALL) which is a game breaker for me.  [I use LVM to
only grow my filesystems as they need it.]

> Please answer, if you use gentoo with a laptop tell me about your
> experiences.

I did, and I guess still do, have issues with my laptop overheating because
gentoo/linux wasn't smart enough to automatically drop the voltage/speed of
my processor.  [During initial emerging I would routinely used Ctrl-Z to
suspend the emerge and the the procesor cool off.]

Part of the problem could be my gateway laptop.  Gateway is known for writing
the bios-level ACPI information in a format that only MS compilers/kernels
will understand.  With the right kernel options, I was about to manually
monitor my heat and manually change the speed/voltage of the processor
via /proc/acpi.

Rather than fix my BIOS and/or install more sophisticated tools, I wrote a
little bash script to check my heat every few seconds and adjust the
processor.  I added it to /etc/conf.d/local.st* and am still using it, months
later.

-- 
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <bss03@...>
ICQ: 514984  YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy

--
gentoo-laptop@g.o mailing list