Gentoo Linux – Page 3 – Patrick's WebLog

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 battery consumption test

Last night I ran a quick test on how long my new Dell Inspiron Mini 9‘s battery would last under “normal netbook workload”.

Details:

OS: Gentoo Linux (what else? 😉 )
Running programs: KDE 4, Konqueror, Thunderbird (fetching mail via IMAPS every 5 minutes)
Conditions:
- Wireless connection to Internet, shell script kills and reloads Konqueror with three websites every two minutes (emulating a user who browses the WWW).
- Display set to lowest brightness level, screensaver / standby / etc. deactivated so that it was switched on all the time

Data capturing:

The ‘remaining capacity’ value from /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state and a timestamp were written to a file every minute:

#!/bin/bash
LOG="/home/pn/batterylog"
echo "Battery log, started $(date)" >$LOG
while ((1))
do
  TIME=$(date "+%s")
  REMAINING=$(grep "remaining capacity" /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state | cut -b 26- | cut -d' ' -f1)
  echo "$TIME $REMAINING" >> $LOG
  sync
  sleep 60
done

Results:

The battery lasted a little longer than 4 hours and 50 minutes which means approx. 6.7 watts average power consumption while browsing the web over WLAN.
This time I decided to use OpenOffice Calc to create the graph – here is a screenshot of it:

(And here is the spreadsheet, if you’re interested: Dell Mini battery consumption log (Spreadsheet))

GPRS with Nokia 9300i, Gentoo and China mobile (2, OpenRC)

Since I moved my laptop to the new OpenRC init framework, my GPRS connection stopped working. At first I didn’t know what needed to be changed, but after having a careful look at /usr/share/doc/openrc/net.example and adjusting the proposed ppp chat script, I got it up and running again. Here is my configuration:

### GPRS ###

config_ppp0=( "ppp" )

link_ppp0="/dev/rfcomm0"

pppd_ppp0=(
        "noauth"        # Do not require the peer to authenticate itself
        "debug"
        "local"         # Ignore carrier detect signal from the modem

        "defaultroute"  # Make this PPP interface the default route
        "usepeerdns"    # Use the DNS settings provided by PPP

        "lcp-echo-interval 15"  # Send a LCP echo every 15 seconds
        "lcp-echo-failure 3"    # Make peer dead after 3 consective
                                                        # echo-requests

        "lock"                          # Lock serial port
        "115200"                        # Set the serial port baud rate
        "crtscts"                       # Enable hardware flow control
)

chat_ppp0="
ABORT BUSY
ABORT ERROR
ABORT 'NO ANSWER'
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'NO DIALTONE'
ABORT 'Invalid Login'
ABORT 'Login incorrect'
'' AT
TIMEOUT 5
OK 'ATH'
OK 'ATE1'
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,\"IP\",\"cmnet\"'
OK 'ATD*99#'
TIMEOUT 60
CONNECT ''
TIMEOUT 5
~-- ''
"

GPRS with Nokia 9300i, Gentoo and China mobile

Perhaps somebody else will find this useful. The relevant part of my /etc/conf.d/net:

(assuming Bluetooth works)


### GPRS ###

config_ppp0=( "ppp" )

link_ppp0="/dev/rfcomm0"

pppd_ppp0=(
        "noauth"        # Do not require the peer to authenticate itself
        "nomagic"
        "debug"
        "local"         # Ignore carrier detect signal from the modem

        "defaultroute"  # Make this PPP interface the default route
        "usepeerdns"    # Use the DNS settings provided by PPP

        "lcp-echo-interval 15"  # Send a LCP echo every 15 seconds
        "lcp-echo-failure 3"    # Make peer dead after 3 consective
                                # echo-requests

        "lock"                          # Lock serial port
        "115200"                        # Set the serial port baud rate
        "crtscts"                       # Enable hardware flow control
)

chat_ppp0=(
        'TIMEOUT' '5'
        'ECHO' 'ON'
        'ABORT' '\nBUSY\r'
        'ABORT' '\nERROR\r'
        'ABORT' '\nNO ANSWER\r'
        'ABORT' '\nNO CARRIER\r'
        'ABORT' '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
        'ABORT' '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r'
        '' '\rAT'
        'TIMEOUT' '12'
        'SAY' 'Press CTRL-C to close the connection at any stage!'
        'SAY' '\ndefining PDP context...\n'
        'OK' 'ATH'
        'OK' 'ATE1'
        'OK' 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","cmnet"'
        'OK' 'ATD*99#'
        'TIMEOUT' '22'
        'SAY' '\nwaiting for connect...\n'
        'CONNECT' ''
        'SAY' '\nConnected.'
        'SAY' '\nIf the following ppp negotiations fail,\n'
        'SAY' 'try restarting the phone.\n'
)