Robert Small, The blog thereof.

I started using TuxOnIce when I switched kernel’s to the kamikaze sources. I’ve been doing a few things to try and get the best power usage out of Linux and my IBM X31 possible, TuxOnIce seems to do an excellent job suspending and resuming my entire OS. Without giving it any extra kernel parameters and only changing a few options within the configuration. For those of you who haven’t met TuxOnIce, it’s the new Suspend2.

Some of you may know that I’ve recently purchased an IBM X31 and that I’ve been trying to get the best battery life from it possible. One of the things about this is not having to restart whenever you have to change a battery, hibernation as it was dubbed by the windows developers is a useful trick for this. I can wait till my battery is almost run out, hibernate, change batteries, then start up again and resume where I left off. This can be done in a short enough time to preserve a net connection and not ping out on IRC! I’ve actually considered creating a ‘blank’ suspend image which has the main core of the OS and the DE loaded already and simply resuming to that instead of ever starting a new session, the problem with that would be resuming from a different partition when I’d actually suspended. I’d also have to create a new version of this image each time I updated my kernel or certain bits of core software, this will take some thought before I decide to go into it but it does provide something for thinking about.

I’m intending to build my father a media centre, this will (of course) use a Linux core and a probably a MythTV front end. This project would greatly benefit from a suspend image booted from a CF card, in fact, it would be almost instant boot and instantly be usable from where it last was. This might be a method of producing a very fast unalterable distro, your entire filesystem could be on ram-disks and your entire operating system could be stored on a suspend image, all you’d need is an initrd image and a kernel. The entire system could be updated by a bootable dvd which simply replaces the suspend image. If anyone has any comments on this then please do leave them as I’ve become interested in the concept within the space of writing it. Before I get attacked for breaking freedom and closing an OS, it wouldn’t be closed at all, the suspend image could be disassembled and edited with absolute ease; to prevent this some for of checksumming or signing would have to be implemented and I would not support that. Tell me your thoughts.

I used to use Suspend2 when I first experimented with Gentoo a few years ago, now I’ve returned to it for my IBM X31 I’ve resumed my interest (pun not intended). Back then I was looking to completely replace windows and show my school that it was possible. Although I proved this to myself they were still cynical and blamed every problem on Linux, even when the camera refused to work on their windows PC’s. There are none so blind as the willing. I do find it both sad and somewhat frightening, people believe what they’re told by the people they believe are right; even after being shown categorical results to the opposite. I’m rambling.

Do leave my any thoughts on the suspend image based OS.

Kind regards, Robert.

Tags: Gentoo, Linux, Mobile computing, Mobile technology, Suspend2, TuxOnIce

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.