While my experience to date with Ubuntu 10.04 has been mixed, I have found one compelling reason to employ it, at least for owners of laptops based around AMD's Athlon L110 and RS690 chipset, like my Gateway LT3201u: it has working power management support. This processor does not support typical power-saving methods, i.e. manual frequency scaling; instead, it provides support for AMD PowerNow! in the form of multiple idle states. Ubuntu Lucid is the first release of Ubuntu (and possibly the first release-version distribution of any type) to include a kernel with cpuidle support working on this machine.
Confusingly sharing a name with a Windows utility for controlling processor activity, cpuidle is a recent addition to the Linux kernel which makes CPU idle state management simple. Operating in much the same fashion as CPU frequency management, cpuidle features both in- and out-of-kernel (userspace) "governors" for management of CPU idle state. This enables most modern processors to be shut down to differing degrees while not in use, as an alternative to or possibly in addition to frequency scaling.
The results are immediately apparent, as the machine no longer comes up to high temperature and high fan within a short time after power-on. So far, lubuntu has demonstrated no tendency towards video corruption as I saw with ubuntu, but that could be coincidental and based on video drivers.
Gateway LT31
Hey, thanks for the post.
Can you elaborate on the increase in battery life (I get 4.5 - 5.5 hours on Windows 7 with my 6 cell)
Does sleep/ hibernate/ wake work flawlessly?
It's pretty minimal
I get maybe another half-hour than I used to, from 3 to 3.5 hours. Looks like processor frequency scaling is going to be necessary after all. Which means Lucid doesn't help, and I either need to goto Debian (so I can patch the kernel without having Ubuntu nightmares) or just give up and run Windows 7. It came with Vista, but that was useless. Never buying anything from Gateway again, mostly because they disabled AMD-V. In my book that makes this effectively a Sempron, not an Athlon 64, regardless of what CPU is in there.