Saturday, June 10, 2006

Automatic shutdown and power-up for grumpy

No point having another computer running in the house 24x7 if we're not recording or watching all the time. The MythTV Wiki has an entry doing this using ACPI.

I installed powersaved (which doesn't support my AMD Duron 1600, stepping 00), and acpid.


grumpy:~# powersave -S
ACPI
grumpy:~# cat /proc/acpi/alarm
2006-00-00 **:**:**
grumpy:~# echo "2006-06-10 18:00:00" > /proc/acpi/alarm
grumpy:~# cat /proc/acpi/alarm
2006-06-10 18:00:00
grumpy:~# shutdown -h now


So far so good. Let's see if this works. [Waiting for 8 minutes] Of course, that didn't work. Go into the BIOS, enable the RTC Alarm resume function, and for good measure also enable Wake-Up on RTC Alarm Interupt. Let's try again... And it didn't work with my motherboard. Darn it.

While at it, I at least added CPU temperature monitoring from the information displayed in /proc/acpi/.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

WIFI & Linux

Yet another sad area in Linux hardware support is anything WIFI. This norwegian page gives a fairly gloomy, but at least current overview of what's out there. Atheros (madwifi) and Intel Centrino are the recommended hardware options. Consistent with what I hear from co-workers.

Here is an extensive list of cards that use an Atheros chipset. Sounds like the best option to me. The list at the Madwifi web site is long and appears to be reasonably up to date as well.

Update (a few weeks later):
And we learn that USB atheros devices are not supported well by the madwifi driver. Even though a Netgear WG111T has the right chipset, the USB device layer doesn't pass X through. *sigh*