Running Intrepid on Thinkpad X60s a bit cooler

One of the areas where out of the box Windows Vista beats out of the box Ubuntu is handling temperature. As X60s has rather slim chassis then temperatures inside and on surfaces are quite similar. And this is not so convenient if you’re right-handed trackpad user as this is the exact warmest spot on top.

I’ve been using the following bash script recently to get temperatures down a bit:

echo 5 | sudo tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/*/power_level
echo "auto" | sudo tee /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.3/usb4/4-2/power/level
sudo iwconfig wlan0 power on
sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower 12

First line seems to make the most difference.

When using the laptop after running the script I find that with light wireless activity Gkrellm reports following temperatures:

BAT1: 34 BAT2: 32 CPU: 50 GPU: 48 PCI: 46 THM0: 50 THM1:52

And after reverting changes it seems to stabilize with:

BAT1: 35 BAT2: 34 CPU: 50 GPU: 48 PCI: 51 THM0: 51 THM1:52

Unfortunately I’m afraid it has a price because occasionally my wireless connection seems to drop for no apparent reason and the only way to get it working again is to reboot. Not nice but could be due to something else.

For some further power usage cutdown – and mostly if it makes it cooler it also reduces power consumption – you could apply powertop suggestions:

echo 1500 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
echo min_power | sudo tee /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
echo 5 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode

Also without changes powertop reports 17.2W and after 13.7W, those are not absolute values as there was almost no wireless or CPU activity but they do highlight relative difference.

Last but not least, if you don’t use bluetooth you can switch it off using Fn+F5, but you knew that already, didn’t you?

Discovering Amarok’s features

Must admit than I don’t know about recent features of Winamp, since I haven’t used it much in a year or so, but last time I did, it couldn’t handle file renames. So if I noticed that some file had a name not reflecting track info correctly or I just moved it to a different folder my playlist and library were left broken.

To my surprise when I renamed files and then tried to play them with Amarok it didn’t happen at all. This player has a wonderful feature called AFT: Amarok file tracking. This is simply genius!

It’s somewhat surprising how I’ve got accustomed to Amarok. I remeber I used to miss Winamp in the beginning. But newly discovered AFT and support for listening to last.fm directly in player are really great features.

Those of you being brave but using Windows can also give it a try: Amarok for windows.

Using Thunderbird profile cross-platform with Lightning installed

It’s rather trivial that you can use the same profile between Windows and Linux by finding the profiles.ini for one or both platforms and editing it so that the profile folder is the same. It’s a bit more difficult with Lightning though as this extension has separate versions for different platforms. So if you have Windows version installed, it looks odd in Linux and vice versa.
At this point, don’t give up! Go to http://lligabirres.com/francesc/00_index/05_net/05.02_EMAIL_CLIENTS/05.02.02_THUNDERBIRD.html and scroll down. Simple instructions that I just followed and it is looking fine from Windows. Haven’t tried from Kubuntu yet, but should be ok, I hope. Not to mention that the profile itself is on ext filesystem so I also installed Ext2IFS which you can get here: http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html.

You must be joking, right? (Silverlight for Linux :))

While browsing around with Firefox in Kubuntu I was presented the following offer:
picture
How stupid is that? And why would I even want it? At the moment I’m rather happy with my system, I use Vista on the same machine rather rarely because it is just so slow while Linux is pretty fast and everything I need in everyday use is working. That includes wireless, USB, printing over LAN to a printer attached to XP machine and accessing XP fileshare. Figuring out the last one in Kubuntu didn’t take much time, while in Vista, well after couple of searches I felt I have better things to do with my time. Sure I might eventually take the time to tweak Vista to be faster, but I doubt it’ll be any time soon. I like that I don’t have to bother with typical Windows updates that interrupt usually at the most inconvenient time possible. Sure I update both OS-es but Kubuntu’s updates never disturb me, I’m just notified that there are updates available. The only bugger at the moment would be temperature that is higher in Linux compared to Windows.