If you are planning to run linux, seriously re-consider buying laptops with hybrid graphics. The graphic card might or might not run, the card switching will most likely not work, but you can ignore it since you can work with the intel card, right? Well, no. Most of the AGP, whether used or not, will eat up power, the fan will run at full speed and your laptop's behind will be hot enough to stir fry some veggies.
If you have a laptop with hybrid graphics, and you can't make it work, just switch off your discrete card.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics
Laptops in general, and linux laptops tend to run hot. However, don't mess with power settings a lot. Putting harddisks on powersaving mode(refer hdparm) so that they become idle puts unnecessary strain on the disk. You can try out experimenting with cpu frequency(cpufreq-set).
</quote>
If you want your "discrete card off" to persist through restarts, you will have to add this to your rc.local
modprobe radeon # Assuming ati card
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
For suspend/resume, you will have to add a new file /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00radeon-switch
#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
hibernate|suspend)
echo ON > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
;;
thaw|resume)
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
;;
*)
;;
esac
exit 0
I have discovered putting the cpu policy to ondemand causes problems with pulseaudio(your volume icon will always be on mute and ps will show a pulseaudio process in D). I stopped fiddling with cpufreq, set it to performance, uninstalled cpufreq and was good to go.
And as I commented earlier, I will strongly advice against putting the hard disk in power saving mode.
>If you are planning to run linux, seriously re-consider buying laptops with hybrid graphics.
Yes, best buy in my opinion is thinkpad with only intel graphics or if you have discrete graphics, turn it off in bios (it works as expected). There are no problems with (over)heating, everything works out-of-the-box. It seems that thinkpads are well supported in Linux as I've had no problems yet.
Thinkpads are good as a work computer, but if you're looking for personal computer (for watching movies, playing some games, looking at pictures), the screen on anything but x200 series is going to hurt. And that one is pretty overpriced I think (it has worse cost/performance ratio than MacBook Air, and that's something).
If you have a laptop with Nvidia Optimus like mine (Intel and Nvidia cards), Bumblebee will help a lot with power management: http://bumblebee-project.org/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847971
<quote>
If you are planning to run linux, seriously re-consider buying laptops with hybrid graphics. The graphic card might or might not run, the card switching will most likely not work, but you can ignore it since you can work with the intel card, right? Well, no. Most of the AGP, whether used or not, will eat up power, the fan will run at full speed and your laptop's behind will be hot enough to stir fry some veggies. If you have a laptop with hybrid graphics, and you can't make it work, just switch off your discrete card. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics Laptops in general, and linux laptops tend to run hot. However, don't mess with power settings a lot. Putting harddisks on powersaving mode(refer hdparm) so that they become idle puts unnecessary strain on the disk. You can try out experimenting with cpu frequency(cpufreq-set).
</quote>
If you want your "discrete card off" to persist through restarts, you will have to add this to your rc.local
For suspend/resume, you will have to add a new file /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00radeon-switch I have discovered putting the cpu policy to ondemand causes problems with pulseaudio(your volume icon will always be on mute and ps will show a pulseaudio process in D). I stopped fiddling with cpufreq, set it to performance, uninstalled cpufreq and was good to go.And as I commented earlier, I will strongly advice against putting the hard disk in power saving mode.