Matthew Saltzman wrote:
With the original F8 spin, my T61 nVidia did not Just Work after install. It works with the vesa driver (except that the backlight never goes off),
My experience with a T61p with nvidia gfx card. The vesa driver works well, and the 2D performance is acceptable; there is no Xv support so a there is a high CPU usage when playing video, and there is no CPU-free full screen rescaling, but you don't have performance problem. I'm not totally sure, but I think it was possible to play an (unscaled) HDTV video; both mplayer and X will use a lot of CPU, but this machines is a dual core. :-) Vesa driver means no 3D acceleration (bad for Google earth). It also means poor power management: I didn't manage to go below 24-25W with vesa, but with the nvidia driver it goes down to about 15W. Hibernation works perfectly. Damn missing power management...
and it works with the nv driver after fully updating (modulo a couple of issues like suspend).
I remember to have tried this options too and discarded it quite soon; my hope was to have better power management than with vesa, but it wasn't so and I got a crash when switching to a textual console, if I remember correctly.
It works well with the latest nvidia drivers from Livna (including suspend to RAM, but not hibernate).
I'm currently using the nvidia binary driver. It is fast in everything (2D, 3D, video). It has good power management. But, in addition to "only-free philosophy" issues (8 megabytes of binary blob in my kernel!) it is a costant pain if you want to reliably use suspend/hibernate. After a lot of experimentation and tweaking: - suspend to RAM apparently works quite well, but I'm not using it too much - fedora standard hibernation didn't work - tuxonice based hibernation (cubbi kernel) works after heavy tweaking, but not perfectly; I can often hibernate and resume with an open nvidia binary X session, but the resume process always stalls for about one minute during resume (some CPU livelocking message appears in the log with a stack trace deep inside the nvidia stuff) and the suspend process sometimes (15-20%) hangs the machine for no apparent reason (and your session is then lost). If the hibernation problems don't improve I will use suspend to RAM more often.
Everything else works pretty much out of the box. And is fast as hell. Could just be a little lighter and have a bit more of autonomy (3h is not enough) but i'm still tweaking the power mgmt bits (got mine yesterday).
With powertop I get to around 15-16W with nvidia binary. The 9 cell battery is 84Wh. The 6 cell should be 2/3 of that.
Three hours is all I've been able to get with the 6-cell battery. If you discover anything magic, I'd like to know. Thanks.
Powertop is your friend. You can also disable the radios with the hardware switch, but I got some nasty interrupt craziness and crashes when reswitching them on. (!) Other BIOS related details: - SATA should NOT be in compatibility mode - you have to activate the CPU virtualization if you want to play with kvm Best regards. -- Roberto Ragusa mail at robertoragusa.it
