Re: [gentoo-user] gnome login panel how to disable restart and shutdown buttons

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 11:08 PM, Stroller
<stroller@××××××××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
>
> On 26 Apr 2010, at 14:25, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>> ... I have a machine that's a
>> MythTV backend server. It sits quietly in our living room doing it's
>> job, but it only does that roughly 4 hours per day so for 20 hours it
>> wastes electricity. To make more use of the hardware my wife and son
>> use it at times to browse the web. They are used to shutting off other
>> computers and they sometimes make mistakes and shut this machine off
>> so we lose recordings.
>
> In the case of your particular Myth box, it might be worth looking at sleep
> / hibernate / BIOS wake functionality, to save 20 hours' electricity per
> day.
>
> I haven't looked at this in detail, but I think that Myth can write a wake
> up time to the BIOS, say of 5 minutes before the next scheduled recording.
> Thus even if you wife does switch the computer off, it will switch itself on
> again so that you don't miss your show.
>
> Stroller.

Yes, power consumption is very much on my mind these days. All the
light bulbs have been changed. A new pool pump is saving me about
$80-$90/month. I'd like to do a new fridge but that's not for now.

Computers are a big portion of the bill around here and learning how
to reduce power is high on my priorities for the next few months. I'm
not sure how to handle a multi-use box like this. It's an 8-thread i7
processor. I was wondering about powering off certain core when the
machine isn't doing much. Does Intel hardware do that? I need to
determine how much power is in the processor, the chipset, memory, the
disk drives. The machine is 3-drive RAID1 using data center drives.
The WD Green drives just didn't work for RAID. I'm sure 3 drives is
adding to my power consumption, but maybe they can be spun down more
often. Myth recordings are currently stored on an external USB drive,
so that's more power.

The problem with this machine is that it's a desktop watching
recordings during the day and from 7PM to maybe 3AM it's generally
busy recording things. However the TV setup in this house is changing.
I'm dropping cable and going with satellite. They provide their own
DVR so maybe I'll drop Myth for a while if things work out. That would
simplify things, assuming their DVR doesn't consume huge amounts of
power. Their DVR supports watching on a Windows PC so I can probably
us their app in VMWare which I already use for NetFlix.

I appreciate the ideas. I'll likely be asking questions in this area
over the next few months.

Cheers,
Mark