Lower power portable Linux

[Kent Johnson]

Ben Scott wrote:
>   A recent review[1] of the Asus Eee PC stated (paraphrased): Power
> management on Linux sucks.
> 
> [1] http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/11/16/review_asus_eee_pc/print.html
> 
>   Back when I looked into this (years ago), that was largely true.
> During active use, Linux was more power efficient vs Windows, but when
> the machine was fully idle, Linux did little to save even more power.
> Turning off the CRT was about it.  S3 (suspend-to-RAM) was often
> prevented by drivers.  S4 (suspend-to-disk) was experimental,
> unstable, and/or just plain didn't work.

 From the comments to the above:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/11/16/review_asus_eee_pc/comments/

The battery drain while sleeping issue that you had isn't some fault of 
Linux, it's just a configuration option that Asus set. There are 
multiple sleep modes in machines with ACPI - apparently they chose 
"suspend to RAM" which allows for extremely fast wakeups but uses some 
power rather than "suspend to disk" which takes longer to wake up but 
uses no power.

which at least implies that suspend-to-disk is available and works better.

Kent