Sometimes I just want to use my netbook as an mp3 player all day, or to read a pdf on it. I don't need most of the normal services in order to have this capability, nor do I need a full desktop environment like Gnome. It's nice and all that the current low power mode drops the cpu power, but those processes are taking up power too.

What I'd like to see is a mode that possibly kicks the whole system down to a different runlevel, possibly with a more stripped down WM as well. I wouldn't need cron, or a screensaver, console-kit-daemon, avahi, bonobo activation server, fusa, or cupsd, or the network connectivity processes, and hopefully such a mode could also turn off the webcam and wifi chipset for even greater savings. None of this is necessary just to read an ebook, or listen to an mp3. What say you, devs? Good idea? How much power savings would result? I suspect this can all be configured by me but it would be nice to be able to do it easily and switch back and forth in a convenient manner, and that's a little out of my league.

You can do this using the PAUSE_SERVICES function in eeepc utilities, set that and then drop a script in /etc/acpi/eeepc/powersave.d to go go init 3 and disable your hardware.

Quick and dirty example:



Just be sure to set Eee PC Utils to go to high rather than powersave on battery and you can use that function. In addition it will still give you the kernel tuning changes etc to save power.

You'll want logic to reverse it, and to remember the settings, but that should be pretty trivial.

No changes to the Eee PC Utils is required since it already can do what you want.

Well that's very interesting. And you say the function only works when it's run from the powersave is off in the utilities? Is this the file that's labelled acpi.local that pause_services goes in? What's the syntax needed to turn it on, and have it turn itself off when I want to drop out of that mode? How do I set pc utils to go to high mode, that doesn't interfere with the pc tray settings?

Any chance on kind of a walkthrough on how to do it? It would be great if we could get this onto the wiki so anybody could set it up easily.