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[CatMoran]

When I say 'somewhere over' that is because there is an annoying (to me) behavior where the sleep mode appears to actually stop the cpu from running at least some stuff. An every-minute crontab entry should run every minute.  I saw it miss sometimes as much as 15 minutes worth of executing, so when they set the thing to sleep it's really sleeping.  In my opinion this is a bug, but others might differ in opinion.

Getting ~10 hours on the battery sounds good, but not if sleep mode is going to interfere with other processes. Do you have a media player installed? (Preferably mplayer, but Totem or vlc should do.) I'd like to know if it goes to sleep in the middle of playing a movie. If it does, I'm going to stick with the average battery life I'm currently getting.

[eeddccdd]

I thought that was the idea - much of the power saving comes from shutting off the CPU. So in ebook mode for example, the CPU is only up when you ask it to flip the page.

After all, what would draw more power? The Marvell chip and the antenna, or the CPU?

I'll wait til they get the bugs out, I guess. I don't want to have to reinstall everything all over again. My 656 on q2d12 works acceptably.

[admdvs]

another bug in 691 - about about 30 seconds of idle time the screen dims to about 7 our of 15, then when you wake it up, it dims down to 1 our of 15, instead of back to what ever it was just sent to.   691 does feel sluggish to me too. but i'm gonna tough it out until 692 comes out.   

closing the lid puts it into "deep sleep" and it jumps back to life as soon as you open it again.

Anyways.. this is all good news --> the next offical update will include lots of power saving stuff so we should start to see run times closer to the promised 10 hours in normal mode and 24 hours in ebook mode.  We might not hit those targets but the next upgrade will give us better run times than we have today with the offical 653.

To answer your question - NO.. upgrading to a newer build does NOT mean you are flashing your drive.. but do back up anything important before doing any sort of change to any computer.

[davewa]

Here's an interesting thing to benchmark:  What sort of battery life could we expect if playing music files?

And are these battery life measurements taken with the WiFi hardware enabled or disabled (airplane mode)?

[newbie]

I tried to upgrade but for some reason it didn't work. Do I have to upgrade to something else first? Or am I (being not very smart with all things linux) better off waiting for the big, enormous update that has been just around the corner for several weeks now? How do I now which build is currently running?

[punmaster]

If you want to find out what build you are running:

Code:

  cat /etc/issue

To find out what firmware you are running:

Code:

  cat /ofw/openprom/model

Those go at the console obviously.
Hope that helps.

[newbie]

Thanks a lot punmaster!

So...I'm running build 650 on firmware Q2d06. Seeing that we'll probably have to wait several weeks for the major update - does it make sense for me to upgrade both? Or should I just wait? What advantages do the updates that are available already offer?

UPDATE: Never mind, I'm an idiot - I just found the wiki page with all the important information and am upgrading both.

[newbie]

Okay - now I'm confused...

I updated to 656 and the new firmware. I had to re-install all of my stuff, which strangely doesn't seem to work anymore. I can't, for instance, re-install mplayer (actually, I installed it, but it doesn't work). If I reboot pressing "o" on the gamepad, I am back to build 650 and mplayer works fine again.

What's going on here? Should I just keep booting 650 and pretend my upgrades never happened? Why do I even still have 650 on my xo?

My apologies if any of this has been covered elsewhere - I couldn't find it.

UPDATE: Huh? Now I get Build 650 every time I reboot (no matter if I press O or not). Help?

[Grampa]

I have never found it very satisfactory to update via the olpc-update method. It is supposed to preserve your programs and settings, but I find it preserves only some of them. I use the total wipe method: put the update files on a USB or SD drive, and boot while holding down the four game pad buttons. You do have to reinstall everything, but at least you know everything will work.

[sracer]

I briefly upgraded to 690 and then 691... the rudimentary power management was a nice addition, but performance was quite sluggish and wifi connectivity was sporadic so I went back to 656. 

I then discovered that I could no longer boot from my SD card (which had XUbuntu installed).  Upon further investigation, I discovered that the card had been corrupted/wiped out. 

I had heard about the whole "sd card gets wiped out when suspending" issue before, so I didn't have the card inserted when I initially tinkered with 690.  But when I reached a point that I thought I'd stick with 69x I inserted the card.  I think that when the XO dimmed the screen and went into a reduced-power mode it zapped the card.

Has anyone else experience this?

[fyoder]

Yes, sracer, I experienced sd trouble.  It wasn't wiped out, and fsck was able to fix it, but it had to rebuild the journal (using ext3 file system).

Also annoying, when it goes to sleep, it loses its network connection, at least it does for me using a usb ethernet adapter.  Doesn't matter if there's activity, that is to say, if one's in the middle of downloading something, the download is interrupted, and on waking the network connection is gone and one has to run dhclient to get it back.

I like the idea of power management, but this may be just a little aggressive at the moment.

[jeremyinaussie]

gidday, i'm running the 1772 joyride build.

my problems with automatic suspend were cured by adding an empty file here , like this..

# su
$ touch /etc/ohm/inhibit-suspend

the pm in the newer builds is an interesting idea, however it is a hassle when it stops a download in progress.

i had afew probs with the sd card getting whiped, then i changed to ext2...no problems as yet, even after a few battery run outs.

[GregYohn]

Hi!

At 30% of battery my machine turns off with 653 OS.

[sracer]

gidday, i'm running the 1772 joyride build.

my problems with automatic suspend were cured by adding an empty file here , like this..

# su
$ touch /etc/ohm/inhibit-suspend

the pm in the newer builds is an interesting idea, however it is a hassle when it stops a download in progress.

i had afew probs with the sd card getting whiped, then i changed to ext2...no problems as yet, even after a few battery run outs.

My SD card got wiped out under 1772.  I had to re-fdisk to recreate the partition table (but contents remained intact).

[Gabey8]

Hi!

At 30% of battery my machine turns off with 653 OS.

You might want to bump up to build 656 -- I think that's the most current stable build.

I'm not sure if that will resolve the battery situation, unfortunately, but at least you'll be up-to-date as far as stable builds go.