Reducing HP 4720s power consumption under Ubuntu Linux 11.10

Mainly annoyed by the loud fan I looked into ways of reducing power consumption of the HP Probook 4720s and came up with this script: #!/bin/sh -e # Increase filesystem write cache timeoutecho 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs # Enable power management on all PCI devices find /sys/devices/pci* -path "*power/control" -exec bash -c "echo auto > '{}'" … Continue reading Reducing HP 4720s power consumption under Ubuntu Linux 11.10 →

Shortcut icons on Unity desktop

Noteworthy as Unity's turn away from the desktop towards the launcher might be, I'm an old dog and like my screen crowded. The (manual) way to create a new desktop shortcut icon to an application is to create a shortcut file in the Desktop directory, i.e: /home/george/Desktop/Firefox8.desktop And the contents: [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Name=Firefox … Continue reading Shortcut icons on Unity desktop →

The "exe" process on slow Ubuntu bootchart

Ubuntu 11.10 does already a good job at starting faster, but if you've read one of my previous posts on Ubuntu startup time [1] then you know that there is always something to be tweaked for better or for worse. Part of the process is to defer services that are not needed immediately (i.e. printing) … Continue reading The "exe" process on slow Ubuntu bootchart →

HP Probook 4720s on Ubuntu 11.10 64bit Oneiric Ocelot

The new Ubuntu 11.10 is out as of yesterday, and naturally it is time for another upgrade. Because of the many tweaks [1], [2] I decided for a fresh install, this time directly on the notebook harddisk instead of a flash card. The live ISO worked nicely from the USB stick except for the WLAN, … Continue reading HP Probook 4720s on Ubuntu 11.10 64bit Oneiric Ocelot →

Ubuntu upstart scripts executed twice during boot

As I am continuing my efforts to improve Ubuntu boot time [1] I started noticing that bootchart [2] would list several processes twice and the boot logs would complain that all mountpoints were busy or had been mounted already. A closer inspection of the logs reveals that indeed several scripts were being executed twice: the … Continue reading Ubuntu upstart scripts executed twice during boot →