Ubuntu's Power Consumption Tested

RedDragon writes "Ubuntu 7.10 is due out on Thursday, October 18, and in addition to desktop 3D effects, GNOME 2.20, and other features is the use of the Linux 2.6.22 kernel with the tick-less (CONFIG_NO_HZ) kernel feature. But does this mean enhanced power savings when compared to past Ubuntu releases? Phoronix tested Ubuntu power consumption looking back 2-1/2 years at the six Ubuntu releases from Ubuntu 5.04 to the yet-to-be-released Ubuntu 7.10. Testing was done when the system was idling and then under load, and when the Lenovo notebook was powered via the battery and then again with the AC adapter. The Pentium M CPU temperature was also monitored. While Ubuntu 7.10 does include the tick-less kernel feature, more daemons and processes running by default on these modern Ubuntu releases is actually causing an increase in power consumption."

Comments

Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[cleatsupkeep]

I'm confused - don't computers now use more power then they used to? Because of new software and being able to do more powerful things?

I mean - Vista will use more power than Windows XP, OS X will use more power than Mac OS 9.

Or is there a fundamental flaw in my logic that I'm missing here?

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[imbaczek]

Or is there a fundamental flaw in my logic that I'm missing here? Yes, you are. Some parts are manufactured with power consumption being #1 priority and software is also getting smarter. (As TFA admits, at least theoretically :grin:>)

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[cleatsupkeep]

That makes sense - especially when they are testing on a laptop - I guess my reply was more with desktops in mind. Good point.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[reset_button]

Some parts are manufactured with power consumption being #1 priority

Since all of the tests were run on the same hardware, power-efficient hardware is taken out of the equation.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Cruicky]

It would have been nice if the article confirmed that the HPET timer was active, which I believe is rather important for the tickless kernel to work most efficiently.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[volsung]

By going to smaller transistors, lower voltages, and more clever power management schemes, they have managed to get more work done per watt than before. A new 3 GHz Athlon64 X2 requires 89W of power, whereas the old 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird used 74W.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[noidentity]

Yeah, it's not the OS that's supposed to be using much of the new power; it's user applications. If anything, operating systems can reduce system usage by improving how they allocate system resources. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac OS X were more efficient than Mac OS 9 in some ways, due to having real multitasking and decent virtual memory (funny I'm typing this on my Mac OS 9 machine).

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[dpilot]

The HPET stuff is now scheduled for merge into the 2.6.24 kernel. I've had to patch my earlier kernels to get HPET, which as you say is really necessary for tickless to do its stuff. The article suggests that this is a stock Gutsy installation. But then again, most distros do a bit of custom patching of their kernels. In particular, Gentoo does not include the HPET patch.

So the question here: Does the Gutsy kernel have the HPET patch applied?

If not, then these power numbers are definitely pessimistic, presuming that they move to an HPET kernel (2.6.24+) as it's available.

Someone here with a Gutsy system should run "powertop" on it, and let us know. IIRC, powertop suggested that I use the HPET, and with a little digging I found that a patch was needed, and took care of it.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Gerzel]

I'm with you man.

I'm confused as to how this might matter at all.

I mean an OS like Ubuntu has so many options that while yes you can test to the standard install does that test mean anything? Who goes with all-standard settings for their machine if they use that machine often? And if it is a machine that you are going to leave on and never change the settings, such as a lab computer, and you are worried about power consumption per machine (which for a large institution or a large lab savings might be considerable) wouldn't you tweak the settings to get things down yourself?

Power saving to me seems to be something more in the settings, what effects you use, how quickly the monitor turns off and goes into power saving mode etc. rather than a function of the over-all os.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[jombeewoof]

So the question here: Does the Gutsy kernel have the HPET patch applied?
  Nope,
Powertop asks me to install the patch, or set it up in my Bios, so I can only assume it is not setup on my clean install of tribe 5.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[A beautiful mind]

HPET is in the vanilla linux kernel since at least 2.6.21, because I had it working after a motherboard flash update. The patches you talk about is actually helping to enable HPET support for some chipsets, but are not mandatory for a working HPET support.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[SuperQ]

Does this answer your question?

$ grep HPET /boot/config-2.6.22-14-generic
CONFIG_HPET=y
CONFIG_HPET_MMAP=y
# CONFIG_HPET_RTC_IRQ is not set
CONFIG_HPET_TIMER=y
CONFIG_HPET_EMULATE_RTC=y

$ dmesg | grep hpet
[ 8.328261] hpet0: at MMIO 0xfed00000, IRQs 2, 8, 0
[ 8.328266] hpet0: 3 64-bit timers, 14318180 Hz
[ 0.744000] Time: hpet clocksource has been installed.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[rmerry72]

A new 3 GHz Athlon64 X2 requires 89W of power, whereas the old 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird used 74W.

So a new CPU is using 20% more power than the old one. Doesn't sound more power efficient to me. Better efficiency would involve the second number being lower than the first.

Sure but "it does more faster" I hear you say. That needs qualification. With the same battery I'll be able to use my laptop for 20% less time (say 2.5 hours instead of 3). If it does more faster, how come I get 30 minutes less time to use it before my battery craps out?

What would be better is a CPU that can use up to 89W when it needs it, then falls back to much lower - say 10W - when it idle and waiting for me to type a clever response into Slashdot. You need power consuption is only relevant over a period of time, so figures need to be in Kwh to be of any use. TFA stated tests last 15 min so all figures can be converted to Kwh. Your arguement doesn't.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[gameforge]

Better efficiency would involve the second number being lower than the first.

No. Better efficiency would involve the second number being lower and also having equal clock speeds. The former is multiples faster as it has more than double the clock rate and is a dual core.

So if you start your number crunching computer program and push "Start" and it takes 15 minutes on the first CPU and over 40 on the second, presuming you were to turn your computer off when the program finished, you'd have used the first one for less than half the time.

With the same battery I'll be able to use my laptop for 20% less time (say 2.5 hours instead of 3). If it does more faster, how come I get 30 minutes less time to use it before my battery craps out?

Not really; most laptops and many desktops can scale their speed. If you want to accomplish 15 minutes of work in 40 minutes, you can either throttle the newer CPU's speed (presumably using much less than the full power rating) or replace it with an older processor which is not as efficient (and therefore equally as fast, but likely to use more power).

If you scaled your new one down to less than the speed of your old one, you'd get more time out of it. So if you're watching a DVD and not really accomplishing a lot of "work", that's what you'd do to get more time than the old laptop but still have more processing power.

Remember, 3GHz refers to CPU clock cycles per second - an old thunderbird gets less done in a cycle than a new Athlon64 X2. So even a 1.4GHz single core Athlon64 is faster than a 1.4GHz Thunderbird. So you can slow the new one down from 1.4GHz and still get the same work out of it. A DVD might be choppy at 500MHz on a really old machine, but a brand new state of the art processor might be able to deal with it just fine at 500MHz, even if both machines have similar bus and memory speeds and come with the same MPEG decoding video card.

What would be better is a CPU that can use up to 89W when it needs it, then falls back to much lower - say 10W - when it idle and waiting for me to type a clever response into Slashdot.

Actually, this is a characteristic of both transistors and vacuum tubes, and therefore literally all CPUs do this. The amount of voltage supplied to the CPU is supposed to be constant - but the more transistors you use, the more amperes are drawn (volts * amps = watts). Relative to peak power usage, the difference between two idle CPUs is likely negligible, even for older models.

Find a computer with a variable speed CPU fan, and listen for it to shut off when you're idling. Less heat means less power.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[dpilot]

Interesting. I had to apply the patch, at the very least because my laptop has an ICH4 chipset. That chipset doesn't officially support the HPET, but if you apply the patch it works.

The other day on the powertop mailing list the HPET guy said that it was getting merged in 2.6.24. But come to think of it, my SMP deskside at work has run HPET with no patches.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[dpilot]

Sure looks like it does. But it appears that the patch may be needed for some chipsets. I need the patch for Intel ICH4, but not for an SMP deskside. Do you know what chipset you have?

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[volsung]

You do realize that a dual core Athlon64 is many times faster than an Athlon Thunderbird? You can easily underclock an Athlon 64 until it uses less than 74W, or grab the laptop version with much lower power consumption, and it would still outperform a T-bird. (I grabbed the first power measurements I could find and assumed people could do the scaling in their head.) Modern CPUs also do the power throttling you describe already.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Locutus]

yes, that's been how it's worked for many many years. In 25+ years, I think the only OS I've run across which got faster between release versions was a version of OS/2( v3/Warp maybe? ).

What would have been more interesting, once they knew the results were not interesting, would have been to test Kubuntu Gutsy and Xubuntu Gutsy. Then, atleast they could show what differences there were with out-of-the-box versions of Ubuntu. And there should have been something to show.

LoB

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[iamstretchypanda]

What would be better is a CPU that can use up to 89W when it needs it, then falls back to much lower - say 10W - when it idle and waiting for me to type a clever response into Slashdot.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool'n'Quiet It works by reducing the processor's clock rate and voltage when the processor is idle.. Before you bash someone else make sure you don't make yourself look like a jackass in the process.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[aqk]

I'm confused - don't computers now use more power then they used to?

About 25-plus years ago, I had a computer- it was called an IBM 3090, and it filled the entire basement of a commercial building. I was its system programmer.
It used a LOT of power- enough to light up a suburban block of houses. And it cost close to a million dollars, and that's without the air-conditioning.

I am now typing this reply to you on my small desktop-
It has more than ONE HUNDRED times as much disk capacity as that old computer, about 20 times its RAM (heck just my video card has more RAM than that old computer), and clock speed... well, let's just say my desktop is... umm, somewhat faster.

But as of yet, I have no thick 440 volt power cables running into my den, and no water-cooled giant air-conditioners humming on my roof.
Actually, unlike the old mainframe, my PC doesn't need to be water cooled. What a relief!
(But I understand this relief may be short-lived)

So do you still think a new Windows (or Linux) system sucks more power than an old IBM deskt..., I mean Factory-top?

(no jokes about "vista sucks", please)

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another important detail to consider is that the 2.6.22-14-generic kernel package includes HPET, while 2.6.22-12-generic does not. Which did the test use? It's not clear.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is there a fundamental flaw in my logic that I'm missing here? Yes, you are. I think you mean, "Yes, there is.".

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[m6ack]

I'm running latest Ubuntu Gutsy on a T43, and "dmesg | grep hpet" yields me nothing.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Big Jojo]

HPET isn't essential for the tickless kernel, not at all. I run tickless on several machines which don't have HPET. I wouldn't swear that their test system was a system with working HPET, for example.

What HPET is nice for is Higher Precision timer interrupts; what do you think the "HP" stands for?

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[uglyduckling]

Gutsy Gibbon beta, up to date with the latest packages, running on Pentium 4:

lee@paul:~$ dmesg | grep hpet
[ 16.394101] hpet0: at MMIO 0xfed00000, IRQs 2, 8, 0
[ 16.394107] hpet0: 3 64-bit timers, 14318180 Hz

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Mattsson]

I mean - Vista will use more power than Windows XP, OS X will use more power than Mac OS 9. And while on the subject, it would have been nice to have seen a comparison including Windows NT, 2k, XP and Vista at idle and full load on the same machine using the same measuring device.

It wouldn't really be a apples to apples comparison, but it would still be interesting.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Jamie Lokier]

Gutsy Gibbon beta, up to date with the latest packages, running on Core Duo laptop:

jamie@amilo:~$ dmesg | grep hpet
jamie@amilo:~$ uname -r
2.6.22-14-generic

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[pipatron]

filled the entire basement of a commercial building

I mean Factory-top

I'm so confused now, don't you mean Factory-bottom?

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

So do you still think a new Windows (or Linux) system sucks more power than an old IBM deskt..., I mean Factory-top?

But can a new system run COBOL? I hear from programmers it sucked no end. Maybe that's the explanation, not hardware differences.

*ducks*

(And isn't that a "factory-bottom" rather than "factory-top"?)

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[jackharrer]

Actually it would be apples to apples as all those Windows OSes are NT-kernel based. And results are very predictable.
But comparing OS9 with OSX, that can be very interesting. They changed the whole OS in the meantime. Plus adding few versions of OS X, as Apple is very actively developing it.

Can somebody do it, please?

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

# grep HPET /boot/config-2.6.22-14-generic
CONFIG_HPET=y
CONFIG_HPET_MMAP=y
# CONFIG_HPET_RTC_IRQ is not set
CONFIG_HPET_TIMER=y
CONFIG_HPET_EMULATE_RTC=y


# dmesg | grep hpet


And:
# uname -a
Linux ********* 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Wed Oct 10 06:00:47 GMT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

So it isn't working for me and my kernel has HPET support.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[kidcharles]

I mean Factory-top I'm so confused now, don't you mean Factory-bottom? Maybe I have a dirty mind but after reading these posts I'm now envisioning two factories having anal, er, I mean receiving-dock sex.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since all of the tests were run on the same hardware, power-efficient hardware is taken out of the equation.

Except for the power-efficient hardware for which newer versions of the kernel better support the power-efficient features.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Mattsson]

Also, since Apple use almost standard x86 hardware these days, with mostly OSX-bondage being the difference, one could compare the NT-class systems, Darwin-class systems, BSD-class systems and Linux-class systems on the same machine =)

Now that would be interesting.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Bert64]

The new chip gives you choice...
You can either have massively improved performance (2 cores, more than twice the clockrate, more memory bandwidth and more instructions per clock so more than 4x faster) or you can downclock the more modern cpu and/or disable one of the cores, meaning it will still be faster than the older chip and still use less power (but obviously not perform as well as it could).

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[Bert64]

Not electrical, but i'm sure they suck more processing power to do similar tasks.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[rmerry72]

The new chip gives you choice...

True, so the question becomes: Does Ubuntu appropriately configure or use the chip to make use of that choice?

If the O/S doesn't step down the chip when the not in heavy use then the chip burns along at full speed for longer than necessary. A faster, more modern chip will therefore use up more juice.

Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

As cool as these Compiz effects are, they should not be forced upon everyone, just made very easy for people to obtain.

Plus, this version never actually booted up because it didn't like my Broadcom 4318.

Re:Snazzy effects

[F-3582]

Rest assured, it takes you four mouse-clicks to disable them. Every tried that under Vista?

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu made a big mistake by enabling Compiz by default. It doesn't work half the time, and the fall back mechanism is buggy to say the least. Considering that Ubuntu is primarily used by people that are fairly new to Linux, Ubuntu users are often totally lost when something goes wrong. The number of related questions in the Ubuntu channels on Freenode are a sure sign that enabling Compiz by default was a huge mistake.

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

Vista takes 5.

1: Right click on desktop.
2: Select Personalize
3: Select Theme
4: Select Windows Classic
5: Click OK.

Re:Snazzy effects

[nmb3000]

Rest assured, it takes you four mouse-clicks to disable them. Every tried that under Vista?

Five clicks to change to Windows Classic or Aero Basic. This includes the click to "Apply" the new settings.

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to defend Vista... but the desktop effects can be disabled rather easily. Furthermore, the desktop effects in both Vista and OS X are incredibly stable. That's definitely something that can't be said for Compiz. Why include something in the default install that's reasonably unstable? At the moment, Compiz doesn't even work on an extremely large subset of video cards... It's a lot less of a hassle for the people that want Compiz to install it themselves, than for the people who don't want it, or don't have supported hardware, to have to deal with crashes and other problems before figuring out how to disable it. There are plenty of packages that would be more appropriate to include on the installation CD.

P.S. I know that Compiz is supposed to disable itself if supported hardware is not available, but the number of forum posts and questions in the Ubuntu IRC channel prove that this is not happening in a significant number of cases.

Re:Snazzy effects

[Svippy]

Yes yes yes, but you are forgetting the five hours it takes me to figure out it was called "Personalize".

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

As cool as these Compiz effects are, they should not be forced upon everyone, just made very easy for people to obtain.

As cool as memory protection is, it should not be forced upon everyone, just made very easy for people to obtain.

Really. WTF? A compositing window manager hides drawing updates. Does it actually help you in any way to see your windows redraw? I tried moving some windows around with Compiz (and wobbly), and with Metacity, and Metacity takes about 50% CPU on both cores, while Compiz takes no measurable CPU.

Why should we keep shipping a system that shows redraws and takes more CPU by default? Is there any good reason, or is it just "new things scare me"?

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

If it took you 5 hours to figure that out then you really do not need to be using a computer...

Re:Snazzy effects

[feepness]

Yes yes yes, but you are forgetting the five hours it takes me to figure out it was called "Personalize". Let me guess... you thought it was "Refresh"? No wait... you must have kept trying "Undo delete"!

Re:Snazzy effects

[Xogede]

You forgot "Allow" after each of them.

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

I have UAC turned on but did not receive any prompts. Have you even used Vista?

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, doing that will also fuck around with your sound scheme and other things so it's more like 20-30 additional clicks to undo those changes.

Re:Snazzy effects

[PopeRatzo]

If it took you 5 hours to figure that out then you really do not need to be using a computer

You are blaming the victim for Microsoft's poor interface design. My colleagues all have PhDs, and those of them who have bought new machines with Vista have already followed my advice and upgraded their machines to XP Pro.

And the interface is only part of the problem.

More to the topic, I've only recently set up an Ubuntu Studio system that has 7.04. It's stable, runs great, and stays out of my way. I can't yet do everything on it I need to do, but I'm offloading more and more of my post-production to that system.

Re:Snazzy effects

[jaxtherat]

5 - 4 = 1 1 more click in Vista you insensitive clod!

Re:Snazzy effects

[Runefox]

I'd prefer a HW-accelerated interface to one that's more or less driven by the CPU. The flashy effects can be turned off if you don't like that, though some of them (desktop cube, "expose", and so on) actually provide some utility.

I'm still very disappointed in any OS that can't wobble its windows.

Boingy boingy. Amusing for idle time.

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

What problems did they have?

Re:Snazzy effects

[SirTalon42]

Compiz prevents the GPU from ever going into any power savings state. Thats a current limitation with all the drivers. The problem arises because whenever theres any 3D visuals being used, all power savings features are disabled for maximum performance.

Sure compiz is causing less heat from the CPU, but it's causing far more from the GPU because of the (current) limitations. Also compiz indeed doesn't work very well on a LOT of pieces of hardware (though, I have a good feeling that by the time the next major release of Ubuntu would have come out that would have changed, with possibly only nvidia hardware being the only ones that won't work it out of the box)

Re:Snazzy effects

[Wylfing]

You forgot a few.

1. Right click on desktop.
2. Cancel or Allow?
3. Select Personalize
4. Cancel or Allow?
5. Select Theme
6. Cancel or Allow?
7. Select Windows Classic
8. Cancel or Allow?
9. Click OK.
10. Cancel or Allow?

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Vista (not any more, thank god), and it certainly does prompt you on clicking "Personalise", and likely on changing themes (although I've never done this, it does prompt for things that "serious"). Perhaps your UAC is actually remembering your settings (a miracle!), or they've recently patched it, or you've changed UAC's paranoia level, or you're using some bizarre/broken version of Vista.

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

SEE PROOF LINXU IS 20% BETTR THAN WINDOZES!!1!!11!

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

I just tried it under a normal user and as an administrative user - both on this system and in a VM. Not once did it prompt me. I think your memory is faulty.

Re:Snazzy effects

[ScrappyLaptop]

Try 10 the first time:

1: Right click on desktop.

2: Click 'ok' to answer the popup, "Do you really want to right click here?"

3: Select Personalize.

4: Click 'ok' to answer the popup, "Personalizing Windows could jepardize your system, are you sure?

5: Select Theme.

6: Click 'ok' to answer the popup, "Themes are potentially dangerous. Please verify that you really, really know what you are doing."

7: Select Windows Classic.

8: Click 'ok' to answer the popup, "Windows has detected that you are not running an official copy of the Windows operating system. You will not be able to use some of the more advanced features. Click ok to use the Windows Classic interface."

9: Click OK.

10: Click 'ok' to answer the popup, "Windows will now reboot. Please remove any CD or DVD disks and click ok."

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

Wrong.

Re:Snazzy effects

[PitaBred]

Most Vista apologists on this site have a lot in common with Young Earth Creationists.

Fixed your sig for ya... no thanks needed :) Though you are right about Personalize not needing the Cancel or Allow dialog, I am still trying to figure out where to change the icon size and text size on the desktop. Poked around for 10 minutes, and nothing I could find would do it. If that's not a poor UI, I don't know what is.

Re:Snazzy effects

[dfn_deux]

This is patently false. I've run compiz, beryl, and compiz fusion on my Core duo laptop for quite sometime and the frequency scaling features of my CPU remain active. I did however find that using the kde power applet vs the gnome one provided more functionality and easier config.

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

It's perfectly possible to perform compositing without using 3D at all. X has had the COMPOSITE extension for some time now. The purpose of Compiz is to offload the compositing and parts of the window management to the GPU via. the 3D engine, instead of doing it with the 2D engine and software.

Just because it's using the 3D engine doesn't mean it should enable every single possible effect though. Compiz can (and should) composite without making my windows wobble and flop all over the screen like a bad acid trip. The mistake Ubuntu seem to have made is that they've enable almost all of the effects by default.

Re:Snazzy effects

[weicco]

And it seems that at least one troll around here has a bad eye sight. Right click on desktop, choose Personalize and click that "Adjust font size" link at the left hand side of the window.

Re:Snazzy effects

[MaxShaw]

Hold Ctrl, scroll the mouse wheel to resize icons. Just like what you'd do in most browsers.

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you're used to the way things worked in earlier versions of Windows and can't wrap your mind around slight changes, doesn't mean that Vista has a poor UI. Infact, it hasn't.
But it's still not worth paying more than approximately 20 dollars for, IMHO.

Re:Snazzy effects

[PopeRatzo]

My favorite reported problem was that they bought a brand new, powerful laptop with Vista and it didn't run any faster than their XP machine with half the power.

That, plus their proprietary apps no longer worked, they hate DRM and couldn't believe Microsoft spent seven years to come up with... this.

Re:Snazzy effects

[pipatron]

Compiz prevents the GPU from ever going into any power savings state.

...the frequency scaling features of my CPU remain active.

Re:Snazzy effects

[marcello_dl]

>If it took you 5 hours to figure that out then you really do not need to be using a computer

Heh, how things change: parent poster showed the somewhat lazy attitude that make many people complain about linux being "difficult" while it's just different, and you replied with the same "get a clue" attitude of linux geeks.

Re:Snazzy effects

[JohnBailey]

Does this mean that 2008 might be the year of Vista?

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

Point out factual errors isn't being an apologist. BTW nice use of another YEC tactic - that of attacking the person, not the message.

Re:Snazzy effects

[5of0]

I hate to defend Vista... but the desktop effects can be disabled rather easily. Furthermore, the desktop effects in both Vista and OS X are incredibly stable. That's definitely something that can't be said for Compiz.

I'm not sure about Compiz, but I've been using Beryl, which is supposed to be less stable, and the only time that it's gone awry is when I've asked for it by screwing with stuff that I shouldn't have. Out of the box, it works like a charm. Now that they've merged back into Compiz Fusion, I have every confidence that the Compiz team will continue to ensure stability.

Why include something in the default install that's reasonably unstable? At the moment, Compiz doesn't even work on an extremely large subset of video cards.

Since we're making the comparison, Vista and OSX are a lot less video-card intensive "effects". Not to mention OS X doesn't have to worry about hardware anyway, since you can only get it with their pre-packaged hardware bundles in the first place. Vista's "effects" consist of what, window transparency and a cheap window flipper? In all fairness, Compiz Fusion (which it is now) is way more advanced and therefore demanding than either of the above options.

It's a lot less of a hassle for the people that want Compiz to install it themselves, than for the people who don't want it, or don't have supported hardware, to have to deal with crashes and other problems before figuring out how to disable it. There are plenty of packages that would be more appropriate to include on the installation CD.

What is this? People whine about Linux being ugly, Linux being klunky, Linux being for geeks. So just when we are finally getting to the point where we can put some stunning effects (that are also very functional and helpful in managing your desktop) that even put OS X to shame in some departments (I'm not claiming total superiority, that would be unspeakably foolish), and we get whining because "What if they don't want it?" In order to be accepted, Linux has to work, and be pretty out of the box. This kind of thing has to happen in order to work. I'll give you that crashes are a problem that need to be addressed, but overall it is a necessary step.

Re:Snazzy effects

[dave420]

Don't try arguing reality in any discussion involving Vista. For the great strenghts of the Slashdot crowd, Vista seems to bring out the nutters :)

Re:Snazzy effects

[SEMW]

I am still trying to figure out where to change the icon size and text size on the desktop Umm. Right-click on the desktop. View. Ooh look -- Large icons, Medium icons, Small icons. I wonder what those buttons do?

Re:Snazzy effects

[SEMW]

See: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=327635&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20981805

Re:Snazzy effects

[marcello_dl]

Exactly. 2008 and the next five years.

Re:Snazzy effects

[dfn_deux]

Whoops! My bad, I didn't even realize that GPUs had power saving modes, I guess that makes sense. For what it is worth, I haven't noticed any reduced battery life on my laptop with all the wiggle and fade enabled. I'd recommend this particular brand/model to anyone looking for a laptop with full linux support, Toshiba Satellite A105-4014, the only bit that doesn't seem are the "media" keys to the left of the keyboard.

Re:Snazzy effects

[Xogede]

(Grandparent was a lame attempt to be funny)

Re:Snazzy effects

[Phroggy]

Hold Ctrl, scroll the mouse wheel to resize icons. Just like what you'd do in most browsers. Seriously? I've never done that in a browser, and it certainly would never have occurred to me to try it in Explorer.

Re:Snazzy effects

[drew]

So just when we are finally getting to the point where we can put some stunning effects (that are also very functional and helpful in managing your desktop) that even put OS X to shame in some departments (I'm not claiming total superiority, that would be unspeakably foolish), and we get whining because "What if they don't want it?" In order to be accepted, Linux has to work, and be pretty out of the box. This kind of thing has to happen in order to work. I'll give you that crashes are a problem that need to be addressed, but overall it is a necessary step.

It's not a matter of not wanting it. I would love to have it. But the NVidia card on my laptop can't do it. So unless they also have some substantially improved NVidia drivers in the new release, this is a bad thing. And saying that it can be disabled in four clicks (or even one click) isn't very useful, when the problem that keeps me from using it currently is that it makes my mouse cursor disappear.

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

What interface problems did they have?

Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

touche

Re:Snazzy effects

[PopeRatzo]

What interface problems did they have?

I can answer this way: They loved the color scheme.

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

That can be changed. Please explain what about the Vista interface they found difficult.

Re:Snazzy effects

[PopeRatzo]

Please explain what about the Vista interface they found difficult.

It would be easier to demonstrate.

Go give Vista a try and get back to me. I'm sure you can get a copy with your employees' discount.

Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

First - I don't work for Microsoft. Second I have Vista installed on my main windows development box. Third -- My 5 year old son can figure out Vista, why can't you?

Other OSes?

[p0tat03]

I'd be more interested in seeing how Ubuntu's power consumption stacks up against Windows and MacOS...

Re:Other OSes?

[mpetch]

Me too, but I'd need to be able actually read the article with Safari on OS/X first.

Re:Other OSes?

[Simon (S2)]

I'd be more interested in seeing how Ubuntu's power consumption stacks up against Windows and MacOS...

Yes, that would be interesting! Can you make one and post it here?

Re:Other OSes?

[tomee]

I agree. There also seems to be no info on whether they used the 3d-desktop stuff. I would imagine that that would have a much greater impact on the power consumption, and it would be interesting to see some data on that.

Re:Other OSes?

[F-3582]

Got any links to prove that? I mean, this is a pretty insulting statement you made there, actually.

Re:Other OSes?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like common sense to me. More effects means more CPU cycles (or GPU cycles, either way you're using more power).

Re:Other OSes?

[Splab]

In my own experience running Ubuntu 7.04 gives me somewhere between 5,5 hours and 6 hours of battery time. Running windows XP usually gives me around 8 hours of battery time. I use both distributions for development, I code under MS VS (C++) in windows and use VIM under linux for development (also C++).

Gonna check out the new 7.10 and see if I can get nearer to what windows can give me.

Re:Other OSes?

[pravuil]

Yeah, more stuff, more power. Why does Vista need at least 1gig RAM to run properly, etc...

I've been running Fedora for a while. I've been running games on both xp and in wine. Average idle temp for Linux is around 35C, Microsoft was at around 32C after reinstall but currently xp has been running around 38C on idle. Video runs a lot cooler in Windows though because of Windows Media Player. I do have to give them credit for that. Under heavy load while running games, Linux runs about 42C. Highest temp goes up to around 48C. XP runs on average 46 and highest goes up to 52C while running the same games. Point is there are a lot of factors for this and that. What the tests end up showing is that average power usage only goes up around 1-3%. Not for each upgrade but for the overall life of the OS. I hate these lame attempts to divert and redirect attention. While it provides fodder for the MS crowd, it's convenient that there are no benchmarks for power usage for Vista right along with Ubuntu.

Re:Other OSes?

[cyclocommuter]

As a Lenovo T60p laptop user (running Vista Enterprise), I too would be more interested in a head to head comparison between the ability of Ubuntu to put the Lenovo into various sleep modes such as S3 (Hybrid Sleep), S4 (Hibernate) as well as take advantage of a CPU's adaptive/variable speed capability. In Vista there is a Lenovo software add-on (Thinkvantage) that allows the user to program the power saving mode of the laptop. Using this software (works hand in hand with Vista's Power Options from the Control Panel), one could optimize the laptop to consume less power with the side-effect of generating less fan noise. I wonder, is Ubuntu able to take advantage of these power saving / noise cancelling options?

The last time I used Linux (Mandrake 10, an older version of Simply Mepis), the PC could not even be programmed to go into standby even though running XP on the same PC allows one to do so. Has this changed on the new Ubuntu (7.04)?

Re:Other OSes?

[InvalidError]

I tried to put my laptop to sleep with Ubuntu x86-64 and my laptop crashed during wake-up. On the other hand, sleep worked fine with both XP 32bits and Vista Ultimate 64bits. ... I installed Vista last Tuesday and am pretty glad I got it for only $50 since it looks like I won't be using it much (or at all) in the near future. My laptop is back on XP (too slow and too little RAM to make Vista run sufficiently smoothly for my taste) and I probably won't be booting my dual-boot desktop to Vista very often until SP1 since it appears to become unstable during heavy IO and often/randomly fails to enumerate my external HDDs, quite annoying given that 80% of my storage is near-line.

Re:Other OSes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Video runs a lot cooler in Windows though because of Windows Media Player.

Try a version of mplayer compiled for your CPU. CPU-specific optimizations make a huge difference with mplayer (20 - 50 % speedup), and mplayer has really low CPU usage compared to VLC

Re:Other OSes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Got any links to prove that?

Of course not dipshit, I was making an assumption based upon the article disagreeing with my predisposed opinion.

I mean, this is a pretty insulting statement you made there, actually.

That's why us trolls post anonymously. I was venting because I'm an Ubuntu fanboy. Although if you were to don the hat of tinfoil for a minute or two, it is a little convenient that they came up with such a damning verdict without comparing it to another OS, even when the energy consumption fared better on the latest version than older ones in some tests.

Re:Other OSes?

[darthflo]

Has this changed on the new Ubuntu (7.04)?

I am fairly sure standby was available in 7.04 and (a bit less sure) in 6.06. In 7.10 (scheduled to be released this week), standby and hibernate are both available and working almost flawlessy on my X61t (almost as in "I had to add a few lines in a config file"), so you should be fine.
By the way this box came with Vista, which (as far as I recall) was a bit less power-hungry than Ubuntu, but I still get around 5 hours with compiz and trackerd running (80~120 wakeups/s, around 95% C2 and 98+% lowest cpufreq according to PowerTop).

Re:Other OSes?

[Erris]

I'd need to be able actually read the article with Safari on OS/X first.

Run GNU/Linux in a virtual machine and use Konqueror. I don't know why Safari did not render. Can't vouch for what that will do to your power use.

Re:Other OSes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article using Safari and it worked fine.

Re:Other OSes?

[Dolda2000]

More effects means more CPU cycles (or GPU cycles, either way you're using more power). Actually, I've been wondering about that, myself. I mean, we all know that modern CPUs have rather sophisticated power saving mechanisms, but how is it with GPUs? At the very least, I've never seen any software controlling the power saving mechanics of a video card (but that's not to say that it cannot have power saving built into the hardware).

Is there anyone who knows how GPUs fare when it comes to power saving? What mechanisms do they have, how are they activated, and how much power does a 3D desktop when compared to e.g. games or CAD visualization?

Re:Other OSes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another factor would be that on Windows, you'd normally have black text on a white background, and most X-terminals OTOH are usually white text on a black background.
LCD's usually consume less power while displaying more white stuff.

Re:Other OSes?

[sad_]

funny, because at work we all have the same laptops, i'm the only one running linux (ubuntu) on it and these are my findings:

- my laptop lasts the longest of all when running on battery
- my laptop's batteries are still OK, while my colleagues need theirs replaced.

Re:Other OSes?

[Splab]

My figures are from the same machine, so no production mishaps will affect any specifically. But after some consideration I think the difference between them is windows got better drivers for the GFX board and can thus put it in "slow" mode, while linux might be running at full speed gfx wise.

Re:Other OSes?

[jon_anderson_ca]

The Gutsy screenshot showed drop shadows, so they probably had the bling turned on.

Re:Other OSes?

[slartibart]

I hate windows, and I keep hoping the latest and greatest linux will let me ditch it, but I am bitterly disappointed time after time after time.

The hardware support simply isn't there, and I don't see this changing any time soon. Good luck getting any kind of power management to work on Thinkpads, and I've tried half a dozen models. In nearly every case (exception: intel video), the video driver crashes the machine on resume. On some models it crashes every time, others it's intermittent. Either way, it turnes a linux laptop into a useless brick. If you want hardware support on a thinkpad, you're stuck with windows. End of story.

Perhaps someday Linux will get video drivers that don't completely suck. All that is available now are half-arsed pieces of crap. The opensource community, no matter how devoted, is not going to be able to write a reliable driver because nVidia/ATI doesn't support them. And the companies certainly don't write decent linux drivers themselves either.

I also think it's especially pathetic that Linux has nearly worthless dual monitor support. Not to mention the original topic, which is power consumption. My experience with Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty was that it eats the battery in under an hour, no matter how much you tweak it. Another way in which it turns a $1500 laptop into a useless brick. Yes, I'm bitter.

Re:Other OSes?

[p0tat03]

Um... Hate to burst your bubble but LCD power consumption difference is negligible between any image displayed. It's your backlight that's killing you, not your LCD.

Re:Other OSes?

[paranode]

Strange that it would make a difference since Safari's web rendering engine is based on Konq's KHTML.

Re:Other OSes?

[paranode]

Your second statement would explain the first one by itself.

Re:Other OSes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... Not negligible if you're talking about powering an LCD from a battery. I haven't performed any tests myself, so I'm relying on this.
For the dial-up users:
Test 2: Dell 19" LCD monitor (3 years old)
Black Image: 24.3 watts
White Image: 21.7 watts
They also say that they could reproduce these results every time. They didn't specify a resolution. It's not entirely clear if they displayed 100% white vs. 100% black screens, or if they compared Google vs. Blackle.
Now, many notebook displays will be somewhat smaller, and some people won't always have the whole screen covered with X-terminals (I do, but my resolution isn't very high).
Your mileage may vary.

Re:Other OSes?

[Splab]

Interesting, my desktop background on windows (XP default teletubbie thing) (and VS) is brighter colors whereas my background on Linux is very dark (night scene rendered from one of my projects) - and I do work with VIM in a black terminal, I'm gonna try putting on a white background in Linux and let it run to see how long I get and the same in Windows but with black desktop, 2.5 Watts makes a big difference.

Re:Other OSes?

[Bert64]

I had a Thinkpad 600E (neomagic video), hibernate worked perfectly under linux (using apm not acpi)
I had a Thinkpad T23 (s3 video i think), hibernate worked perfectly under linux using both apm and later acpi
I had a Thinkpad T42 (ati video, but old radeon not supported by their binary drivers), hibernate worked well with acpi so long as you switched out of X before you hibernated (the hibernation scripts i used did this automatically anyway)

Re:Other OSes?

[slartibart]

600e? Can we talk about machines that were produced this century? I tried at least 3 different T60/p's (different video) and some T4x's, and they all fail hibernate AND suspend. (Well, to be accurate, they fail to resume, but the point is the same).

I know it's the video drivers because if you EXIT X (there go all your open apps), then it works fine. But that's useless, obviously. Just switching to a text console with X still running, via ctrl-alt-f1, the video drivers are still running and will crash the machine on resume.

The point is, linux is miles behind windows on power management. I wish it weren't so, but it is. I hope it changes someday. Until then I have no interest in linux on the desktop, just for servers. If they just had power management and dual monitor support, I'd be happy as can be.

Re:Other OSes?

[Night64]

I had the same results regarding Ubuntu. But in Mandriva 2006 (using laptop kernel, and laptop-mode enabled) I had better results than Ubuntu or Windows XP. Around 15-20% more battery time on my laptop.

Kind of.

[khasim]

Although each newer system does more ... they've also improved the code so that it does so more efficiently. Or in the case of the tick-less kernel, other code has changed.

So, the question is: Do the improvements offset the additional features.

The answer is: Yes, to a degree. 7.10beta runs cooler and more efficiently than 7.04 ... but still uses more power than even earlier releases did.

So the next question is: How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them and how much of a power savings will you see then?

Re:Kind of.

[JoshJ]

Cooler and more efficiently? When I was on Gutsy beta early on I had to go back to Feisty because I kept overheating. I do not have any plan to update as I have no need to at this point, and that experience soured me on Gutsy.

Re:Kind of.

[xenocide2]

Gutsy early on (june till late september) suffered from a couple of critical bugs that would likely cause laptops problems. Trackerd, a search indexer similar to beagle and friends, would occasionally get into massive CPU loads, causing me to have to kill it. It also ignored indexing while on battery. I believe both those are fixed, albeit the battery check involves polling something in /proc last I checked. Compiz is also likely to be a heat contributer, as it puts the usually idle 3d chipsets to work.

I keep two installs and a shared /home on my laptop so if something like this happens, I can still fall back on something I feel reliable.

Re:Kind of.

[ozamosi]

Did you use Compiz in Gutsy but not in Feisty, then? A lot of people add Compiz to their Feisty installations, but it is default only from Gutsy, so I'm going to assume that's a "yes" in this post.

When activating Compiz on my laptop, I start to fear hearing problems, because the fans have to be at maximum speed non-stop (it's a Macbook, and I've been using it in my lap - any reproductive abilities are in other words long gone, so I don't have to fear that), while they are off at all times except when playing games or watching movies when I don't use it. The reason seems to be that the 3d accelerator on the GPU emits huge amounts of heat when being used. This is with intel graphics, which I've heard are relatively cool - I don't even want to think about what it would be like with ati or nvidia.

The solution? System -> Preferences -> Appearance, the tab Visual Effects, set to None. You may need to log out and back in. This gives you plain, old Metacity, with more and better window management abilities, but fewer bugs.

Re:Kind of.

[JoshJ]

I have Compiz turned off in Feisty, and turned it off in Gutsy. Cool concept, freezes too often for me. That's not the difference. Also, trackerd shouldn't be causing much of the problem either- if it is, that's stupid. It should come with the stuff on a freshly installed system pre-analyzed, unless I misunderstand how it works.

Re:Kind of.

[robzon]

So the next question is: How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them and how much of a power savings will you see then? I believe the most power-hungry features would be compiz and tracker, which are very easy to turn off.
Btw, I'd like to see these tests rerun on final Gutsy release.

Re:Kind of.

[xenocide2]

The reason seems to be that the 3d accelerator on the GPU emits huge amounts of heat when being used. I think you mean 3d acceleration. 3d accelerometers measure tilt and motion in three dimensions. To address the heat problem you attempted to convey: nvidia is very cool for me -- the chips are designed to be efficient, whereas Intel offloads a great majority of work to the CPU. Admittedly, nvidia isn't the most power friendly driver around; powertop reports it as one of the bigger offenders, but nothing to where I can't watch a movie with the fans getting loud.

Re:Kind of.

[parodyca]

But he said 3d accelerator, NOT accelerometer, which simply means that he goes madly off in all directions.

Re:Kind of.

[xenocide2]

Wow. Guess I took too much work home with me. At any rate, my comment about Intel 3d stands.

Re:Kind of.

[tepples]

I think you mean 3d acceleration. 3d accelerometers measure tilt and motion in three dimensions. I think you mean thrii diimensions. But Wii forgive you.

Re:Kind of.

[Big Jojo]

So the next question is: How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them ,,,?

More like: Why hasn't the Ubuntu team turned off more of that crap by default?

Re:Kind of.

[Jamie Lokier]

Actually, trackerd is a real resource hog on some systems, especialling when it's indexing. Quite a few of us had to uninstall it, as just using simple apps on the desktop would crawl. They're still trying to work out why - some aspects of it may be kernel problems triggered by trackerd. Some of it is known to be poor database implementations for trackerd's usage, for which trackerd is developing various (in my opinion hackish and far from optimal) workarounds. There is no "pre-analyzed" data: it's a tool for indexing your personal files in /home, not your Ubuntu installation! It's those of us with 10^6 files in 80GB or whatever in /home who notice the biggest problems. I don't think it even does index outside /home by default.

Re:Kind of.

[drew]

Another good question: (this applies to 7.04 too)
Why do I need to be running a daemon to view iTunes shared libraries, and why is the daemon that views iTunes shared libraries the same one responsible for Wireless auto-discovery/configuration?

Can somebody please explain the logic behind this one to me? Because it sure would be nice to be able to enable or disable the two of those independently of each other.

Re:Kind of.

[charlesnw]

Well..... its called zero conf. Or more accurately avahi. Or rendezvous on the mac. Its a system for auto discovery and configuration. Google for more details.

Re:Kind of.

[drew]

I know what it's called, and what it does. What I want to know, is who thought it would be a great idea to have playing music from somebody else's shared library be handled by a daemon that also happens to be responsible for discovery and configuration of network settings. Other than the fact that they involve the network, I don't understand what the two have in common, and I find it rather silly that I can't play music from somebody else's computer unless I enable a network configuration daemon that I don't want.

How to test the power comsumption of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Run the particular distro.
2. Make sure the power cord is long and in the open.
3. Allow a penguin to chew through the cord.
4. Measure the distance the penguin flies after chewing into the cord. This will give you some idea of the power usage.
5. Well, don't let that penguin go to waste! BBQ and teriyaki are great ways to make penguin. Personally, I prefer General Tso's Penguin myself.

Re:How to test the power comsumption of Linux

[flyingfsck]

BBQ penguin - ugh!

A penguin is bound to taste terrible - like BBQ seagull - not something I would like to try except in a dire case of starvation. Penguins are actually horrid creatures - noisy carnivorous sea birds. I have been bitten by a little one - not much fun at all.

Re:How to test the power comsumption of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Penguins are actually horrid creatures - noisy carnivorous sea birds. I have been bitten by a little one - not much fun at all. Linus, is that you?

Re:How to test the power comsumption of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

It all depends on whether it is a european penguin or an african penguin...

Sig Fig nitpick

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA doesn't specify error bars, which of course makes the results somewhat dubious. They list numbers to two decimal place accuracy (e.g. 48.00), but since all the numbers end in .00, I'm guessing those decimal places are not significant. In other words, the number are only good to within +/- 1 or +/- 2 or something like that. Considering that they are trying to compare numbers that are quite similar (27 to 33), their conclusions may not be reliable.

When comparing numbers, an estimate of the error is crucial. If the difference between two measurements is smaller than the error, then you cannot meaningfully say they are different.

Re:Sig Fig nitpick

[DarkMantle]

Sorry to ruin your nit pick but a quick google search tells me that the SeaSonic PowerAngel used in the test has an accurazy of 2%.

So a 2% variance on 33 watts is between 32.33 and 33.66. The 27 would be between 26.46 and 27.54.
of course, this is approxamate I just got what 2% of 33 was and added/subtracted. It's the lazy mans math.

Re:Sig Fig nitpick

[volsung]

So that's one piece of the uncertainty on the measurement. The next piece we need is how much the power reading fluctuates while the computer is in a "steady" state. Using my Kill-A-Watt, I've seen short time variations of a few watts on a computer (though it drew more power than a laptop).

Does Ubuntu benchmark this kind of thing?

[maubp]

Does anyone know if Ubuntu actually have machines hooked up to measure this kind of thing in house, looking for regressions in power usage? I gather the OLPC project has thing kind of thing as part of their build system (driven off the code repository), but they are naturally particularly concerned about battery life.

Re:Does Ubuntu benchmark this kind of thing?

[Bearhouse]

Mod up! I remember a bitter conversation with a dude from IBM over OS/2. I was trying to sell it (over Windows!). OS/2 was better IMHO, but just would *not* install on the client's PCs. I'm not talking about noname beige boxes either - my client had Compaq.

Me: "I'm having this problem when I try and boot the Compaq"
IBM: "Urm...well, actually, we've never tried installing it on a non-IBM PC..."

Subsequent lack of success for OS/2 not surprising, (my experience was by no means unique).

Guess testing for power consumption is not up there with eye candy...they're probably right, from a consumer point of view.

Re:Does Ubuntu benchmark this kind of thing?

[LingNoi]

I don't think Canonical does much in-house testing. I thought they got the community to do almost everything to do with Ubuntu, apart from employees who live around the globe and commit their code to the servers.

Re:Does Ubuntu benchmark this kind of thing?

[xenocide2]

There is a team called Laptop-Testing. They have a mailing list, that you might subscribe to and ask about a team effort. This sort of work just doesn't pay off for distros; they can document common power usage problems, but there are so many model specific bugs to fix that getting a "working great" system doesn't translate well to someone else's hardware. Ultimately, the vendors are the ones with the most incentives to make things happen.

But AFAIK, Canonical's relationship with Ubuntu as it currently stands is to:
* Develop Launchpad, the bug tracker that Canonical guided Ubuntu into
* Hire just enough developers to keep Ubuntu afloat
* Take on contract work to improve Ubuntu itself for people's needs

In the current release, it feels a bit like Canonical stole from 2 to make 3 work for Intel's lpia initiative. Hence the underwhelming release.

Re:Does Ubuntu benchmark this kind of thing?

[Wierdy1024]

Except the OLPC tinderbox (the system they use for performance and regression testing) is broken, and has been since March 07 - It's no wonder they're now miles over their power budget, even when idle! Unfortunately, it looks like people from the community can't work on fixing it - access to the real hardware in cambridge, MA is needed.

Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize that the tick-less task manager was supposed to save power. Maybe that could be explained as I've never read anything about it.

misleading

[wizardforce]

very misleading healine. I RTFA and if you look at the nice graph, it actually shows a decrease in power usage since feisty and just about what the prior versions were. AC power consumption idling went from 31 to 29 from feisty to gutsy. while loaded, it went down slightly from 51 [feisty] to 50 [gutsy] the only thing that gutsy was higher in was battery discharge rate idle- it was at 22.26 while feisty was at 21.16. while loaded on battery it went down from 33.51 to 32.21 from feisty to gutsy.

Re:misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

misleading headline or misleading summary?

News: More Processing Requires More Power

[reidbold]

toast, still not free

DC or Marvel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cleary kdawson is trying to officially state his position as Captain Obvious, next article? Birds CAN fly, but only if they use their wings right! Water CAN be wet, but only if it is in a liquid state!

Well duh!

[pair-a-noyd]

"more daemons and processes running by default on these modern Ubuntu releases is actually causing an increase in power consumption."

Ya think?

I just install OpenSuse 10.3 on a tower type and a laptop.
The first thing I do is go in and disable a whole slew of bullshit that's enabled by default.
I LOVE Linux but the trend lately has been to BLOAT it up like a new eMachine that's preloaded with 40gigs of bullshit.

What ever happened to minimal? When I installed Suse 9.3 on my Athlon 64 w/1g ram, it ran like a cat with it's ass on fire.
SAME hardware with OpenSuse 10.2 was abysmal. It was sooooo bad that I was just about to give up on it then 10.3 came out.
It's a slight improvement but, damn! They are developing all the new distros with the assumption that everyone is going to run out and buy all new shit. Shades of M$, dare I say??

For the longest time Linux captured and held my heart because it would run so fast on the oldest, worst case hardware.
No more. Wanna run the latest distro? Better put some $$$ back for all new hardware...

Bloat = power drain.

How about getting back to basics and quit focusing on the bling-bling. Linux is NOT windows and it never should be. Quit trying to make it look and act like windows. Quit trying to make it run windows crap. Be happy that it's not windows. I do not want windows compatibility. At all. Ever.

Kill the bloat and pork and watch power consumption go down. Not to mention the old PC's being tossed out into the environment.

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Change your distro.

I'm not naming a single of the 432 distro's that DON'T have this problem.

Re:Well duh!

[dvice_null]

> What ever happened to minimal?

You would like to have a light Linux distribution? Something like this perhaps:

http://www.puppylinux.com/
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/about.htm
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Re:Well duh!

[Aladrin]

I have to wonder if there shouldn't be an Lubuntu distro that is based on Ubuntu/Debian, but is a truly minimalistic distro like those you list.

I also have to wonder if it would catch on like Ubuntu did since Ubuntu's great advantage is 'ease of use' and not 'one fits all' like some seem to think it should be. Still, I'd like the option to have a fairly familiar environment but will run well on my ancient laptop.

Re:Well duh!

[Simon (S2)]

There is. http://www.xubuntu.org/

It is lighter on system requirements and tends to be more efficient than Ubuntu with GNOME or KDE, since it uses the Xfce Desktop environment, which makes it ideal for old or low-end machines, thin-client networks, or for those who would like to get more performance out of their hardware.

Re:Well duh!

[BlueParrot]

How about getting back to basics and quit focusing on the bling-bling. Linux is NOT windows and it never should be. Quit trying to make it look and act like windows. Quit trying to make it run windows crap. Be happy that it's not windows. I do not want windows compatibility. At all. Ever.

Kill the bloat and pork and watch power consumption go down. Not to mention the old PC's being tossed out into the environment.

Ubuntu certainly isn't windows. That is why you can open the package manager and purge most of the stuff that you find bloated, or use Xubuntu, which is designed to have lower requirements yet still be easy to use. Or if you REALLY want to streamline your system you could install a distro with that purpose, like DSL or Feather Linux. If that is too limited for your needs you could grab a minimal debian install and only install the packages you want.

My point? Different users have different needs. Ubuntu is explicitly targeted and those people who WANT an easy to use GUI and those people who WANT painless support for things they expect to just work. Making an operating system which caters to those users is the main purpose of the Ubuntu project. If your main priority is a streamlined system, then quite frankly you should be looking at something targeted at that rather than complaining about Ubuntu. Besides, it is not as if Ubuntu doesn't run just fine on moderate hardware. I'm using the Gutsy beta on a 5+ year old workstation my dad's job threw out because it was "old" as an example.

Re:Well duh!

[FudRucker]

i agree lots of "user friendly" distros do this...

ubuntu created a perfectly good child of Debian and made a complete and total piece of crap out of it - (mod me down i don't care = i am entitled to my opinion)...

Re:Well duh!

[WK2]

There is. http://www.xubuntu.org/

Or http://www.fluxbuntu.org/

pair-a-noyd's rant is seriously misdirected. Linux is whatever you want it to be. That is one of the advantages of having several hundred active distros.

Re:Well duh!

[corychristison]

I've got an older system here... I built it roughly 5 years ago (I think -- I may be over-estimating). It's an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB OEM RAM, 120GB SATA Hard drive, and an Nvidia FX 5200 video card (I think)...

I used to run SuSE 9.1 and was running it fine for 3 years or so... then came time to try and upgrade to a newer version. Of course this is right around the time that Novell bought SUSE and changed it up a bit. So an easy upgrade was indeed not possible. I decided to try out a few distributions but had a lot of problems finding one that would work fast and I ended up on Gentoo. I know, I know, compile time was a pain in the ass... I decided to go down the XFCE route and use all of the lighter-weight GTK programs... I think I only have one QT program that I actually use installed and it only depends on QT, nothing else.

Xubuntu ran O.K... but not anywhere near as nice as Gentoo is. I think it's not the fact that it was compiled and optimized... I beleive it's because during installation I learned more as I set it up. And I knew what I wanted/needed to run the system. Whereas Ubuntu makes a lot of choices for you, mostly in system services, etc. I have a total of 29 items that start up when I boot. I think only 10-15 of them are actually daemons. Right now I am using 215MB or so of my 1GB of RAM... this is with Firefox (4 tabs), Thunderbird w/Lightning, aMSN, Terminal, Mousepad and a whole slew of items on my panel.

If you want lightweight, make sure you know exactly what is going on your system. And use something like XFCE or Fluxbox versus KDE or Gnome.

Just my two cents. :-)

Re:Well duh!

[pair-a-noyd]

Not misdirected at all. I was talking about the mainstream, premier distros like Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, etc.

Re:Well duh!

[Aladrin]

I stand corrected, thank you. (And thanks to the guy that replied about flexbuntu, too.)

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Including ubuntu in this list again shows how misdirected it was. For most people "ubuntu" is not only ubuntu anymore, but kubuntu, edubuntu, xubuntu, ... as well. All of them coming from the same base and therefore having the same quality of the core / base system. So it is up to the users to choose what is best for his system. If he is not able to do the minimal reading up required for that, maybe he should spent his money on a new machine and give the old one to somebody who has a use for it.

Re:Well duh!

[thePsychologist]

Here, if you want to use Ubuntu and don't like the default configuration, do what I always do - download the alternative install CD, then:

1) Do a minimal command line install
2) Install fluxbox/lightweight manager of your choice + some basic GTK libraries/or whatever you want
3) Download some of your favorite programs

There, minimal install with no extraneous daemons whatsoever. At first there will be a lot of downloading because it has very little on it, but in the end you will be left with a clean system that has a quick bootup and shutdown time and doesn't include anything you don't want (shutdown time for me is about 12 seconds).

Perhaps it's only for nerds, but if a trackerd daemon bothers you that much, you're a nerd. There are some things you might not know with such a minimal install. So here's some tips:

- Shutting down: sudo shutdown -h now
- Rebooting: sudo shutdown -r now
- Starting X: startx (if you install fluxbox, startx will be configured automatically) If you want to customize startx, put an .xinitrc in your home directory and put the command of your WM in there:

exec gkrellm &
exec fluxbox

This also starts gkrellm for my desktop as well.

-Logging in: you won't see a prompt - just type your username and hit enter, or hit enter + username +enter if you want to see a promot
-Search the package manager for cursor and human to get the default cursor
-Install eterm to have a background setter.
-File manager -install thunar
-Terminal - I like xfce4-terminal

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

this is so true. mod up. this guy is spot on. etch is miles ahead of ubuntu.

Re:Well duh!

[McDutchie]

What ever happened to minimal?

It still exists, you might want to give it a try...

Re:Well duh!

[xenocide2]

Indeed, Xubuntu can help with older PCs. And if you want, you can go even more minimal. The default CD's install (x|k?)ubuntu-desktop by default, but you can ask to install something like ubuntu-minimal instead. It might require the alternative installer, I haven't tried it.

Gentoo's case for optimizations and the like is massively overstated. If you dig into debian packaging, you'll see that debug packages have optimization off, and debhelper packages build with -O2 by default, and the gains to be had from recompiling for a specific arch are not as fantastic as you might expect. But if Gentoo is the excuse you needed to run off and be adventuresome with linux and configuration, hats off. Just don't think what you've learned is somehow specific to Gentoo. And you'll save a lot of power by reusing someone else's built packages ;)

Re:Well duh!

[Daengbo]

Ubuntu Gutsy is using 270MB with full Gnome, Tomboy Notes (requiring Mono), Epiphany (5 tabs), Ekiga, Pidgin, sbackup running, and doing an update. I don't find this particularly heavy. All this on a two year old, bargain laptop upgraded to 1GB RAM.

Just don't ask me to start up OO.o. ;)

Re:Well duh!

[corychristison]

I just started OO Writer and it was at a usable state in about 11 seconds and was only using roughly 25MB of my RAM. This may be because I did compile it from source... although I have my doubts. It took forever to compile, thought (5+ hours).
I only compiled it because for one reason or another, to install the -bin alternative required more dependencies. *shrugs*
I've been sitting idle now for a while. Only my XFCE Panel, Firefox, Thunderbird and aMSN running... sitting at 169MB :-D

Re:Well duh!

[eerok]

etch is miles ahead of ubuntu

I like them both. I generally use xfce4 with debian (and usually prefer testing), and it is somewhat zippier, but ubuntu still stands up well for daily things. I prefer ubuntu's meta-packages because it's less of a pain to get what you want. For example, I've been trying openoffice lately (I'm more a vim/latex guy, but I like to try new things). It's very nice on ubuntu, but for some reason it's hideously ugly on debian. I could spend the time to fix it, and I'd perhaps be better off in the end, but sometimes I just don't care that much.

That being said, I only started to like ubuntu as of feisty. In any case, these things are so subjective that it's hardly worth debating them.

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu tries to be something for everyone out of the box, which naturally means that some programs/libraries are installed/enabled by default that not all people need. However, I think disabling the unnecessary parts is much easier than building your own system from scratch and trying to keep everything working smoothly between updates. I think Ubuntu has done a very good job for example in selecting only one program from each category to be installed by default, and the whole thing still fits on one CD. I remember Redhat used to come on 4 CDs many years ago, and you absolutely needed more than one of them just to do a basic install - that's what I would call serious bloat. I for one am very grateful for what Ubuntu has done, but if I ever do get annoyed of the relatively minimal bloat that Ubuntu comes with, I can always go back to Debian. Actually, I haven't tried Ubuntu (that is, Gnome) for a while now, but from my experience at least Kubuntu has only become faster with every release, which is why I'm still happily running it on my rusty old machine bought back in 2001.

Re:Well duh!

[Daengbo]

I've got no argument about whether XFCE is lighter or not -- I used it from Hoary up through Dapper because Gnome just wasn't snappy on my hardware then. Things have improved a lot, though. I find stuff loads a lot faster now than it used to, even on the same hardware. Although people complain about bloat, under 300MB for a full, modern desktop doesn't seem like that much. Five years ago, I was running IceWM and Rox on a terminal server, trying to get the clients under 32MB of use each, but that was then. My server had half the RAM at my laptop does now. I expect more from a desktop now. I like Deskbar, Tracker, Epiphany, F-Spot, and Rhythmbox. I don't want to go back to minimal software.

I think that stock Ubuntu should run decently on any equipment up to 2-3 years old. Anything older than that should probably get a lighter distro.

Now, I only need to:

1. Find out how to reduce the footprint of OO.o, or
2. Hope Abiword gets enough features.

Re:Well duh!

[AvitarX]

I don't know what your point is.

I have a fully bloated Ubuntu 7.04 install with extra stuff running (hellanzb, amorakk, 2 firefox windows with 6+ tabs each, flash plugin, open office and more). I am using 550MB of memory. Still a ton of breathing room on your (or my) 1GB.

In fact looking at mem usage I have:
soffice 78MB
Firefox 75MB
Compiz.real 30MB (first so called bloat) (let's not forget that whatever XFCE uses has some memory footprint too)
Deskbar-applet 29MB (I am guessing most of that is the search feature that I don't use, bloat)
Amorakapp 27MB (bloat, but I like it)
nautilus 23MB (probably really bloated vs mc for examle, but I get previews, and built in search box, shortcuts to places I like and can easily add)
Sound-juicer (not bloated I am guessing)
gnome-panel 13MB (bloat)
hellanzb 12MB (worth so much more space, awesomest daemon I installed)
everything else is less than 5MB each)

So the "bloat" is 122MB vs the two actual apps I am running being 150MB
Of couse I prefer abiword and gnumeric to open office, but some things need the OO.o. The only thing I think is wasting MB is the deskbar and amorak (I want only the run feature, and maybe lauch web search or url from deskbar, and does a music player (even a full featured one) need so much?

I will admit I find Gentoo compelling, because it always sounds like the bleeding edge is available in portage (apperently not too appealing to you), but I am sitting back with Ubuntu, because between official repositories, un-official repositories, and getdeb I have access to a whole lot, and it is easy easy easy.
even if we assume that your custom compile runs everything else with 15% less usage, the bloat is insignifigant in the scheme of things (two simple apps outdoing it). In exchange I get no window redraw when switching windows (not eye-candy, just nice), expose style window switching, "CD flip"? style task switching and a lot of worthless, but fun to watch eye-candy. Along with gnome, which I have hated for years, but now choose over KDE.

Transparency can be use full too, and Desktop Wall plus Expo is nice too,

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time you want to play with the Canonical distros, try the Ubuntu Alternative CD and do a custom install for just the packages you want. As of 7.04 Xubuntu simply isn't sparky any more. This was very noticeable on my P3 450 text box. It runs much better with the custom Ubuntu using the allegedly bloated Gnome.

I haven't checked into Fluxbuntu lately, but for the moment we do need to stop holding up Xubuntu as an example of lightweight desktop. That project has slipped off target, and gives a misleading impression of the benefit XFCE can deliver.

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is explicitly targeted and those people who WANT an easy to use GUI and those people who WANT painless support for things they expect to just work.

... and maybe someday Canonical will deliver that. (sigh)

Ubuntu is really, really great stuff, but for petesakes we're at 7.10 and you /still/ have to edit text files to set up simple file sharing? Bit of a huge gaping hole in the promise there.

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Try "purging" OpenOffice. The "Ubuntu-desktop" metapackage is dependent on it, and just about everything else is mutually dependent with "Ubuntu-desktop."

They took debian's dependency hell and used it to ensure that if you try to uninstall openoffice, it will remove half of your linux install.

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you use the Alternate Ubuntu install disc you can install a minimal system just like Debian. Then install just the packages you want.

I don't do that kind of stuff on my desktop system but on "small" systems like my MythTV and arcade machine I do the minimal install then add just the packages I want. On my desktop/development machine it's easier to do the full desktop install (also using the Alternate install disc) then remove any packages I don't want.

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Kubuntu (= KDE) on a 1,2GHz Duron with 256MB of RAM (bought back in 2001) and I still think it works fast enough for me. I'm usually running KMail, Kopete, Konversation, xmms or mplayer, Firefox, Konqueror, KWrite or Kate and several instances of pterm, but haven't really noticed any major slowdowns.

Several years ago when using Ubuntu (= Gnome) I did become very frustrated with the sluggishness of the system, and I think I seriously considered using XFCE or something even lighter, or even investing in a better machine, but after I changed to Kubuntu I have only felt that things become faster with every new release. I do understand that 256MB of RAM is not enough nowadays, but I don't remember seriously thinking that I need a more powerful machine after I ditched Gnome. Of course it could be that Gnome is faster than KDE nowadays, but I don't think I'm able to go back to the Gnome/GTK world anymore.

Re:Well duh!

[kiddygrinder]

i did it and it worked ok. try doing it right next time. (fyi i'm a total linux noob)

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, meta-packages. How I hate thee.

Try upgrading the (ancient) GAIM 2.1 that ships in 7.04 to a current Pidgin release. Oops. Well I guess I'll just have to install Pidgin alongside GAIM then...

Re:Well duh!

[tknd]

Right now I am using 215MB or so of my 1GB of RAM... this is with Firefox (4 tabs), Thunderbird w/Lightning, aMSN, Terminal, Mousepad and a whole slew of items on my panel.

So you have more than 700MB of RAM sitting around doing nothing. Awesome. You'd be smart to reduce your RAM to 512MB in that situation so save a few watts.

But I think many people have flawed conceptions of what is bloat and what is not, and which types of bloat affect your computer's actual performance. So right now you give two measures of your system: the number of daemons that start and the memory utilization. In my experience, the number of daemons that start is fairly trivial as long as each daemon behaves (no long start-up time, little to no CPU utilization while running). In Ubuntu's case, many of these daemons are new services and usability improvements to make usability of the system better. In Gentoo there is no such effort because you are expected to manage your system for every detail except package dependency management. Ubuntu does not take that approach and assumes you do not want to manage the details. So more software is required to relieve you of the details. It is a time/usability vs resource utilization trade off.

In some cases you could even argue Ubuntu is more efficient because it is silently managing the package updates and it does not recompile the packages every time an update exists. In Ubuntu, you can simply sit there and use your computer. When updates are available, you are automatically notified. In Gentoo you are forced to sync to the repository (which is quite lengthy) and check for updates to packages yourself. Beyond that, Gentoo is never going to tell you if your compiler is outdated if you happen to sync a year later. It is all up to you to manage that.

The memory utilization number should be banished from the eyes of anyone who has never taken or read enough about operating systems and paged memory management. A much better statistic to look at to see if the memory system is not running optimally is virtual memory utilization or swap space utilization. You see, everything runs fine as long as the working set remains in main memory. Once the working set no longer fits you begin to swap pages to the disk which is a very bad thing for performance. Beyond that there is little reason to worry about how much free memory is there (unless the OS'es memory management scheme is incredibly stupid). People tend to think that the more "free memory" they have the better it is which is incredibly wrong. The real answer is the free memory statistic only gives you an idea of how much excess memory you have to work with. If your typical usage consistently shows that you have gobs of free memory sitting around (50% or more), you basically are running with extra hardware you will never use OR you have additional resource capacity to run other useful things. Given you already have the hardware, why not use it.

I've used Gentoo and I still use it (for now). But if I had to do it all over again, I would use Ubuntu for the desktop or home server instead. If memory ever became an issue, all I had to do was go out and buy RAM which is dirt cheap now. That would save me the tedium of managing the system myself and extremely long compile times (especially when the compiler or really large packages are updated). Gentoo is better suited for uncommon hardware configurations, learning how the linux system is built, and granular system configuration/control. Ubuntu is built to make your desktop experience simpler and more useful.

Re:Well duh!

[tknd]

Gentoo's case for optimizations and the like is massively overstated.

Agreed. Most people automatically think that if they compile it themselves, they will get better performance. That's very wrong as compiling and optimization order is an incredibly hard problem. The default optimizations are more of a rule of thumb or this is what has shown to be better than most other optimization orders. The real answer is there is no good way to know the optimal order of optimizations for a specific piece of code without trying every single combination. The result is most people use the defaults provided by Gentoo because they don't know what they're doing.

One of the main benefits of Gentoo is granularity with USE flags. You can either shoot yourself in the foot with this feature or bring your system better security by forcing software to be compiled without certain features. The USE flags allow very customized settings for compiling packages and software features. As an example, I setup a system and expected to have no sound support. So I got rid of all of the sound USE flags like ALSA. A year an a half later, I had the awesome idea of running MPD (music player daemon) and installing a sound card. Well that meant I needed to put back all of those use flags, recompile a number of packages, and install a bunch more because all of the packages had been compiled without that support.

Re:Well duh!

[agwadude]

Ubuntu certainly isn't windows. That is why you can open the package manager and purge most of the stuff that you find bloated, or use Xubuntu, which is designed to have lower requirements yet still be easy to use.

The problem with this picture is that Xubuntu isn't the default Ubuntu. The fact that Xubuntu is both easy to use and lightweight shows that increased bloat and power consumption is not a trade-off for usability. Certainly, eye candy like Compiz will have a trade-off, but even with Compiz turned off, GNOME in Ubuntu is far more bloated than Xfce in Xubuntu. The reason for that bloat is not more functionality or better usability, but bad code. We should put our energy towards writing good code, and stop treating usability and efficiency as mutually exclusive.

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

As if you could tell the difference. It's all in your head, you stupid fucking choad!

Re:Well duh!

[corychristison]

For the sake of explanation:
There is a difference between OO.o loading in ~30 seconds versus 11 seconds.

Asshole.

More features - Same power

[Cryophallion]

Actually, I think it is rather impressive that 7.10 (which has eye candy on by default) has slightly less power consumption than 7.04 (no eye candy by default).

In other words, they increased features while decreasing (generally) power consumption. While it seems to be only about 1 or 2 watts lower (excepting battery idle where it is slightly higher), we are only talking 3-5 watts difference over 2.5 years of updates. In fact, it went down 4 watts using ac idle compared to 5.04, which I am sure had far fewer daemons/features.

Some of this may be better code etc. However, I think we should be giving the people who have been doing the coding here major Kudos for doing getting the most out of our computers (whereas MS wants us to quadruple our ram to use eye candy, they are doing it with the same amount of ram standard 4 years ago on a desktop, and keeping power down). I don't even want to think of what Vista must use in power.

Re:More features - Same power

[bjourne]

Actually, I think it is rather impressive that 7.10 (which has eye candy on by default) has slightly less power consumption than 7.04 (no eye candy by default). Eye candy has nothing to do with it. When the computer is idle there is no eye candy and all processes should be sleeping. But some processes like daemons needs to wake up intermittently to check for various conditions. For example, the battery monitor needs to regularly update its display of how much battery power is left. It is these wake ups that consume power when idling (except for the ambient power draining from the hardware).

So if the idle power consumption increases it means that the wake ups happen more frequently or are longer, which is bad because generally, daemons with no work to do should do as little as possible before going to sleep again and they should wake up as seldom as possible. Someone coded a daemon badly and that is why 7.10 consumes more power than 6.06.1

Re:More features - Same power

[Cryophallion]

A. Doesn't eye candy, etc still consume ram, and therefore power (I may be wrong on this, but it seems a little logical)
B. It does matter under load, and under load it is consuming less power than the preceding version.
C. Bloat and added features should make the computer use more power over time (you can argue that computer should be minimalistic, but more hardware out there, etc, tends to adds more bloat, if only in drivers, etc). It is still impressive that it is as close to a version 2.5 years ago as it is (not to mention that it is better than the previous version).
D. I tend to think there may be more daemons waking up the comp, not a badly written one. More features = more daemons, therefore more wakeups.

I still say give major credit to linux (as the added item is a common to linux in general, but we are talking ubuntu in specific here) coders for keeping power and requirements down compared to both other major os's and while adding tons of new and better things.

Re:More features - Same power

[weicco]

So do you mean that we should stick with Ubuntu XP and not upgrade to Ubuntu Vista? ;)

Re:More features - Same power

[Cryophallion]

Actually, it is making me consider moving back to Ubuntu 3.11...

Re:More features - Same power

[gbjbaanb]

RAM uses all the power it uses no matter how much is used. The hardware still needs to keep the "unused" chips fed with power to maintain their state, even if that state is garbage values.

I think the load v idle factor is more important, when you use your computer you know you're draining the battery/burning dead trees and you accept that. When you put it into an idling state, you want it to use as little as possible. PCs tend to be kept in an idling state for far longer than a used state (eg overnight, while you do something else for a while, while you sit staring at the screen thinking of what to do next, while the PC waits and waits for you to press the next key as your typing)

Perhaps the point of the article wasn't to criticise the current version, but to raise awareness that power consumption is directly linked to applications, especially daemons, and that developers might like to remember that next time they do a bit of coding on them.

Compiz hurts my productivity.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using the prereleases for some time now. A number of my friends said that Compiz made them more productive, so I left it enabled. But then I found that my productivity tanked. A lot of time ended up being wasted waiting for some pointless effect to finish doing its thing. Shimmering windows are distracting and don't really do anything useful. The same for window shadows.

Just to give it a fair chance, I've left it enabled. But even after weeks, my productivity is still hurting. I'm about to uninstall Compiz because it has caused me nothing but grief.

Re:Compiz hurts my productivity.

[s4m7]

There are times I would agree with you here, and it probably depends very heavily on how hot your graphics hardware is. But as far as productivity goes, only certain effects would actually be advantageous, for instance the expose-like function is really nice if you have a lot going on, and the cube just makes me more likely to use multiple desktops in a more effective way because the paradigm makes more sense to me. but shadows, window pop-in and pop-out effects, wobble, even transparency, are only going to slow you down if anything. I guess my point is, it's all in what you have enabled. try tuning your effects to what will actually help productivity, and see if you don't like it better.

Re:Compiz hurts my productivity.

[JohnBailey]

Can't you turn off the bits you don't want? IF not, try downloading Beryl. It is the same thing basically, but has more options than really needed. So you can turn off just about anything.

AMD64

[Nimey]

Laptop users may want to stick with 32-bit Ubuntu, since the CONFIG_NO_HZ (tickless kernel) option isn't available in 64-bit kernels yet.

If you're feeling adventurous, patches here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tglx/hrtimers/

Can Linux improve power management?

[Anonymous Coward]

Micro-HIDE-THE-PATENTS-soft claims vista will save boatloadsof power (vs XP?)...maybe yes maybe no.

Clearly, A Green power saving linux will be Good Thing.

Is Linux currently missing any power management features? Should it be easier to turn off unneeded services?

I can believe that

[MikeRT]

I was pretty amazed with the beta of Ubuntu 7.10. I even installed it on my system, but after about 30min-1 hour of use, trackerd was consistently keeping my CPU usage up at least 30%. That's not the fault of the Ubuntu team, as they did not write trackerd, but they really do need to be careful about the daemons that they allow to run in the background on a default installation. I don't know what it is there for, but according to this description, it doesn't sound like it is something that a vanilla, desktop installation would want on there. The approach to background processes should be the KISS. On a vanilla desktop installation, only the barest set of such thing should be on there.

Re: I can believe that

[Dolda2000]

I don't know what it is there for, but according to this description, it doesn't sound like it is something that a vanilla, desktop installation would want on there. That's not the trackerd you're looking for, though (for future record: You may want to try dpkg -S /usr/bin/trackerd, followed by dpkg -s $PACKAGENAME to find out what it is). Trackerd in the latest Ubuntu is a desktop search thingie, similar to Spotlight or whatever the Vista thing is called. I'd imagine that the load you were seing after about ½-1 hour of use was that it was still busy indexing your preexisting files. Once it gets past that, it gets quite calm in my admittedly limited experience.

The approach to background processes should be the KISS. On a vanilla desktop installation, only the barest set of such thing should be on there. If that's what you want, maybe you shouldn't be using Ubuntu?

Re: I can believe that

[obi]

Maybe tracker shouldn't do initial indexing of preexisting files while it's on battery... could be an idea for a feature request?

Re: I can believe that

[EvilRyry]

There is an option to not index while on battery power. I know in earlier alphas that option didn't actually work, hopefully that is fixed by now.

Re:I can believe that

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone else already mentioned, trackerd is a daemon that indexes user data in order to use the tracker search tool and its other front ends (such as deskbar applet). Furthermore, trackerd runs with a nice value of 19 by default in gutsy. That is the lowest priority a process can have. The only reason it was eating up 30% of your CPU is because at least 30% of your CPU had nothing else to do at the time.

If trackerd's presence still bothers you, it can be disabled via System->Preferences->Indexing Preferences.

Re: I can believe that

[Jamie Lokier]

... it was still busy indexing your preexisting files. Once it gets past that, it gets quite calm in my admittedly limited experience.

That would be nice. After waiting 3 solid days, during which Gnome was barely usable, and freeing up some spare extra gigabytes for the index files, I've still yet to see trackerd get past indexing.

too much crap

[m2943]

There are way too many daemons running on modern Linux systems; it really shouldn't require separate processes for I/O, settings, hardware configuration, every little panel thingy, etc.

Re:too much crap

[A beautiful mind]

So what are the alternatives?

Either you bundle them in one horrid complex mess where maintainability gets inverse squared with any new feature, or you simply don't use the feature at all. With lots of separate daemons you have the option to axe those you don't want/need and the rest are benefiting from a modularized way of looking at things.

Re:too much crap

[m2943]

So what are the alternatives?

Componentize them: turn them into shared libraries and load them into a single process. All panels, widgets, and other add-ons should be loaded into the window manager (or even the X11 server).

The individual components would remain as independent as they are now, but the would run in a single address space, be able to share and access common data structures, and not have the overhead of separate processes and heaps.

Re:too much crap

[A beautiful mind]

Componentize them: turn them into shared libraries and load them into a single process. All panels, widgets, and other add-ons should be loaded into the window manager (or even the X11 server).

I originally wanted to include a paragraph about why separate processes/threads are good, but I forgot and when I realised I didn't want to reply to my own post. You've given me the excuse to hilight a few things about it. :)

Modularizing all boils down to multitasking and separation. The separation part is trivial in libraries and separate packages. Multitasking should be left for the OS to handle, it is very efficient at it, much more so than an in-process solution (not talking about OS supplied threading mind you). Threads inside a single process are not good when a library possibly needs/should have multithreading support, it is not that maintainable. Processes are cheap, the OS takes care of them, which is a good enough reason to use them for background processes.

The library method, where multiple libraries would work together and share and access common data structures in itself is a bit of a paradox. Libraries are commonly generalized pieces of code especially for the reason to factor out common elements from programs. They don't usually share that much common data structures with other libraries, ESPECIALLY when you're talking very general things, like using a common daemon for a lot of wildy different background processes. Creating a master background daemon would require a lot of glue code, with a very small common denominator between the different libraries.

Basically you'd code up the system in a few years and slowly optimize it, and one day you realise that you've reinvented process management in userspace. Matrioshka playing with low level OS functions no good is (try to pronounce the last sentence with a thick russian accent).

Re:too much crap

[m2943]

Processes are cheap, the OS takes care of them, which is a good enough reason to use them for background processes.

No, processes are demonstrably not cheap. Not only do they cost significantly in terms of context switches, page tables, and kernel data structures, they impose an enormous overhead in terms of inter-process communication.

The library method, where multiple libraries would work together and share and access common data structures in itself is a bit of a paradox. Libraries are commonly generalized pieces of code especially for the reason to factor out common elements from programs.

I didn't say "libraries" I said "components". "Shared libraries" is simply the operating system mechanism for implementing them.

Creating a master background daemon would require a lot of glue code, with a very small common denominator between the different libraries.

It only requires a lot of glue code because the C runtime is so idiotic. The real reason why people don't do it, however, is simply that you cannot componentize safely in C.

Basically you'd code up the system in a few years and slowly optimize it, and one day you realise that you've reinvented process management in userspace.

Quite to the contrary: the people who are reinventing the wheel are the people who have been trying to implement a safe, dynamic runtime using C and processes. That's why we have shared libraries, shared memory, DBUS, and all that other stuff. Unfortunately, you end up with something that's far more costly to develop for and far less efficient than if you based your system on a dynamic runtime in the first place.

At a very coarse level, the process and separate address space approach is fine. The X server, kernel, and Apache web server are fine. But trying to push the paradigm beyond that to fine-grained componentization is inefficient and simply not working out.

yawn

[g0dsp33d]

Usually, aren't the only people that care people running servers? Laptops hardly qualify. I only glanced at the article, but I'm willing to bet that they couldn't be bothered to test each operating system repeatedly and scientifically. I'm willing to bet that if they had the difference would have been statistically negligible. A few seconds of battery life isn't much to write home about, unless your running back to it because you forgot to save something...

Re:yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

laptops, the only computers which run on batteries most of the time, hardly qualify ?

Re:yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

I only glanced at your comment, but I'm willing to bet that
you don't run a laptop from a battery regularly. ::Usually, aren't the only people that care people running servers? Laptops hardly qualify. I only glanced at the article, but I'm willing to bet

Re:Gave up on Linux

[zig007]

I won't flame you. Just disagree. Ok, maybe flame a little then:
Because your post is simply a not-so-small pile of bullshit, which *maybe* was even only part true a couple of years ago.

And..eeh.. Isn't the fact that you have to buy special Sun hardware to get something that just works with Solaris kind of crappy?
Why not, in that case, buy hardware that you know are extremely compatible with your preferred linux distro? Or a mac?

Or what? Is your point that I can get insanely good stuff by paying an far more than-equally-insane amount of money?
No shit, sherlock.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly they only ran the experiment once with each setup, hence no estimate of the variance or error can be made. The results tell us nothing - without significance tests the article is, while interesting, nothing more than conjecture.

I'm shocked that slashdot has only rated the parent as "2, insightful". This point is at least as important as whether they used the same hardware for each test, which programs were used for the load test, and whether or not the writer was employed by Microsoft.

Shame on you moderators.

Re:Mod parent up

[maubp]

I was rather dubious about some of those graphs too - both for the missing error bars, and three figures with integer values (plus a point zero zero!). These both suggest they did no repeats on the experiment.

So as you say, at best its a "pilot study" which seems to show that there have been no major changes in power usage by the different Ubuntu releases (on this hardware).

No variance with one observation

[Anonymous Coward]

Read TFA, will ya. There is no variance with one observation! This is meant to be a quick FYI. --AC

Re:No variance with one observation

[volsung]

One could roughly estimate the variance by looking at the meter fluctuations while taking the reading, or checking the design accuracy of the meter in the manufacturer's data sheet. You need some kind of estimate if you are going to draw any conclusions (which the authors of TFA were attempting to do).

Thank you slashdot

[JamesRose]

For an actual linux story, this is what i read for, not the 2000 stories about the iphone, or how bill gates cant get into nigeria, more of these stories please!

Re:Gave up on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

The "far more than" part is totally shit, sherlock. If I went to buy what I want, it will cost me the same money if I bought from Sun or someone else. (And no I am not talking about beige box under your desk that runs Apache and Perl - I am talking about mission critical stuff with 99.99999 percent uptime.) That is the hardware part. Software - I have not yet needed to buy OS support from Sun - the thing just sits and cranks out stuff without even needing a reboot for years.

Come back to the desktop - Macs happen to be my hardware of choice - and I feel no need to put something that needs ton of efforts to just work (forget working nicely part) - OSX is just fine on the desktop, hell even x64 Vista fetches most drivers for my Macbook Pro with no searching required.

So nice try, but nothing you said was with substance or real world experience, and that sherlock equals shit to me.

GET YOUR LINUX TROLL COPYPASTA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fresh from the troll! Get it while it's hot! You're gonna be seeing it over and over and over for months to come, as he proudly reposts it over and over and over, so better get some now and start getting used to it! Only 20 cents per view!

Wakeups

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, 2.6.22 still wakeups quite frequently. I also imagine they didn't turn off Compiz, which produces quite a lot of wakeups (ie there is progress in DRI to fix this).
So 2.6.33 contains many fixes. I'f suggest Phoronix folks to test Fedora 8 (test).

Re:Gave up on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

bleh five nines is 99.999 not 99.99999
can't even get yer marketoid terms correctly tsss ...

Re:Gave up on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

That you, Ubuntudupe?

I completely disagree with everything you said. I've only been using Linux for four or five years, but it has improved by leaps and bounds in that time. I can't see any "long time Linux user" moving away in this day and age where everything gets twice as simple and twice as powerful every year.

I'm writing this on Kubuntu 7.10rc and it's a joy. What do you suggest for the desktop? XP? Certainly not Vista...

Good but...

[suv4x4]

I really wish they put Ubuntu next to latest XP, latest Vista and latest OSX (ok I guess they could wait few days for Leopard to get out).

As an XP user, two Ubuntu tests don't give me a clear picture of how this relates to the OS I use right now. I do suspect Ubuntu will have lower power consumption than XP, and for Vista the margin will be pretty wide.

But how much exactly..?

Re:Good but...

[darthflo]

I do suspect Ubuntu will have lower power consumption than XP, and for Vista the margin will be pretty wide.

In my experience it's the other way round. XP would use the least energy with Vista and Ubuntu eating up quite a bit more (Ubuntu usually being worse than Vista).

Re:Good but...

[Billly Gates]

When I first started using Linux back in 1999 the linux zealots loved to boast how much battery life they could save with linux.

In Linux power saving features were done in software rather than hardware with kernel 2.0. Also windows loves to use the cpu cycle even for empty wait cycles. That was a waste but it was easier to monitor what was going on.

Whats changed?

I wonder if linux does more things in hardware now and uses empty or wait cpu cycles rather than not use them at all?

Linux and BSD were lightning faster and supperior yet much harder to use in the old days. I miss them a little bit for these reasons. I was going to say truly miss them but I had a horrible flashback of trying to X to work and messing around with X86Config with vertical and horrizontal rates to get rid of strange artificats on my screen, no sound, netscape 4, and lots of other horrible things that Ubuntu users dont have to worry about. Fonts too kept me rebooting windows when doing any real work. At least they are now true type.

blame Beagle for that

[Anonymous Coward]

Once beagle is disabled in opensuse the system runs much more smoothly

Won't run on battery

[Anonymous Coward]

trackerd will cease indexing/crawling if on battery. The initial crawl can appear to be intensive, but that's just a one-time deal. On the bright side, later when you need to search for files it's virtually costless.

The Progression of Linux's applications

[Zombie Ryushu]

Linux applications have undergone a Progression in order to try and stay on par with Windows and OSX. To offer greater services and compatibility than Windows can, Linux is trying to compete with applications that have a very small yet main stream arch of compatibility. Putting them at an advantage. They use less electricity because they have less stuff to run because they are FAR less compatible.

That being said, there is something to be said about using better discipline in writing Linux applications. That would help. But as with ACPI, Windows has an advantage. Lets see what we can do to take that advantage away. Remember what we are fighting for.

Re:The Progression of Linux's applications

[I'm New Around Here]

Remember what we are fighting for.

!Boobies!

Re:The Progression of Linux's applications

[Anonymous Coward]

They use less electricity because they have less stuff to run because they are FAR less compatible.

Ah, yes, the electricity argument of compatibility. Will those OpenOffice stop caring so much about electricity consumption and fix their MS Office compatibility, please?

Remember what we are fighting for.

Right, the Global War On Terror. If we sacrifice features to save electricity, then the terrorists have already won!

Tag it lame.

[Vexorian]

Err, shouldn't they be comparing it against exactly the same setup without the kernel tick giberish-thingy ?

On other news, windows 3.11 needed quite less powerful machines than windows vista.

Re:Tag it lame.

[Vexorian]

Thanks mod, you have wasted a modding point, how do people with total inability to read posts correctly get moderator points anyways?

This was not off topic, it is just showing how retarded the comparison is

Re:Ubuntu is bloat. Always has been

[meringuoid]

Stupid to rely on sudo when it has security bugs up the wazoo,

Really? I'm not aware of this.

I can see a danger that Ubuntu is training a generation of Linux users who neither know nor care what root is, and just type their password into whatever dialog box asks for it - that's setting us up for a Windows-style explosion of malware - but bugs inherent to sudo? Please explain, because that's a major issue if so.

30 Watts? WTF?

[zdzichu]

There must be something very wrong with tested system or Ubuntu configuration. 30 watts idle consumption is very, very wrong. My Thinkpad z61t idles at 13-14W with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. I expect lower value after upgrading to 7.10. And maybe even lower when I roll my own latest kernel with patches from lesswatts.org. I would be happy to go to 10W on idle, it would match advertised 6.25 hr worktime with 65Wh battery I have.

Re:30 Watts? WTF?

[n1hilist]

Indeed, currently my Thinkpad T61 idles @ about 12W with the lid closed, this is on Gutsy beta 5.

Re:30 Watts? WTF?

[Trashman]

Just curious, how did you get these numbers? I'm curious to know what my own machine's usage is.

Re:30 Watts? WTF?

[Cryophallion]

On a laptop in gnome:

To setup:
System, Preferences, power management. General tab, change so the icon is displayed when you want it.

Then, go to the notification area. Right click the power icon (battery, ac, etc), then power history.

Go to power history, it gives you a graph of power usage. You can also find out voltage, etc.

Hope that helps.

Re:30 Watts? WTF?

[Trashman]

Cool thanks. I was aware of the power statistics app in Gnome, but It didn't connect in my mind that I could see the wattage. I'm bouncing bet/ 26 and 18 Watts. kinda on the high side. Now I have a baseline. thx again.

Re:30 Watts? WTF?

[SirTalon42]

Mine uses 28-30 watts while idle. Your screen size and other things will make a huge impact on how much power is consumed (I have a big 17 inch laptop screen... I also only get about 1 1/2 hours battery life, even with wireless off).

Re:30 Watts? WTF?

[zborro]

I can confirm that my Thinkpad Z60m consumes just 15-16W on idle when on battery.
I find the phoronix measuring method really stupid with no error bars
and what's the point of measuring just one laptop? It's useless for me.

Maybe they measured the power consumption when trackerd was running!

The real story is that with a tickless kernel you have the potential
using powertop to really kill the power needs and my Thinkpad X31 goes
as low as 7.0 watts when idling so that I have 6 hours on Gutsy and I had
four with an optimized Debian Etch (~9W).

Re:30 Watts? WTF?

[koogydelbbog]

somewhere between Edgy and Feisty my computer (an asus a6km) stopped being able to use the cpu throttling feature which resulted in the processor being clamped at 1800MHz and the fan being constantly on, even when idle. not good. think this was a kernel thing rather than a ubuntu thing but it was enough to get me to reinstall Edgy.

maybe the same is true of the machine in the test.

(i have to boot with -noacpi on my model, which suggests that powernowd shouldn't ever work but it's fine on Edgy, broken on Feisty)

Re:30 Watts? WTF?

[tknd]

First of all they used a different laptop. That probably means different hardware. In my experience the hardware choice has a big impact. Second they used this to measure the actual power consumption at the plug. Lastly, I believe they left the screen on for these tests (disabled screen saver). I don't think it is possible to get into the 10 watt range with the screen on.

Problem: Too many useless processes

[arw]

The main problem with power consumption is a "We no longer care about CPU cycles" attitude among many programmers, especially among the KDE and Gnome crowd. Why is there a daemon for every little thing programs could formerly handle by themselves or through libraries?

Like gconfd for parsing configs and watching them for changes. Or dbus, as if there were no othere proven methods for IPC, that don't require another daemon idling around and waking up every other millisecond eating away battery life. Or just log out from a KDE session and watch those 10 or so beauties like dcopserver idling aroud, eating memory. And does anybody even know what something like bonobo-activation-daemon does?

The laziness of application programmers has gone much to far, instead of using methods that are provided by the operating system and just require finding them there is a load of new, redundant mechanisms mostly implemented by new daemons. Every programmer introducing some new battery-eater should be required to justify this additional power by more than just "its easier this way", "windows also has some registry-parsing daemon" or "but I don't like parsing sysfs myself".

NO_HZ is nice, but only curing the symptoms of a larger problem: daemon-bloat! Get rid of them and you will see some real improvements.

Re:Problem: Too many useless processes

[Ash-Fox]

The main problem with power consumption is a "We no longer care about CPU cycles" attitude among many programmers, especially among the KDE and Gnome crowd.

I heard the opposite with KDE, in particular I heard they want to use things like QT4 because it will consume less resources for the equilivant functions, but can also do new things without requiring such CPU intensive workarounds. I believe I read this in a aKadamy article.

Or dbus, as if there were no othere proven methods for IPC, that don't require another daemon idling around and waking up every other millisecond eating away battery life.

dbus is the free desktop standard for IPC. If you have a problem with dbus, I suggest you talk to freedesktop.org about it.

Or just log out from a KDE session and watch those 10 or so beauties like dcopserver idling aroud, eating memory.

dcopserver will likely be done away with in KDE4, replaced by dbus since it is the freedesktop standard now. I have doubts that dcopserver is really decreasing battery life though to a large extent.

NO_HZ is nice, but only curing the symptoms of a larger problem: daemon-bloat! Get rid of them and you will see some real improvements.

I don't think getting rid of what you mentioned as 'bloat' will really buy battery time. I know the difference in battery life on my laptop when running purely in the console verses x.org+kde is 15 minutes. I have high doubts that getting rid of dcopserver will increase the battery life.

Re:Problem: Too many useless processes

[arw]

I don't think getting rid of what you mentioned as 'bloat' will really buy battery time. I suggest you get powertop and see where all those wakeups are coming from. Nice citation from there: "A good thing to try is killall gnome-power-manager". How paradox. If you follow the tips on their site, 20% more battery life are easily achievable (3.5h instead of about 3h on my T60).

Re:Problem: Too many useless processes

[dbIII]

dbus is the free desktop standard for IPC. If you have a problem with dbus, I suggest you talk to freedesktop.org about it.

Socket to them! The new direction in gconf is encouraging and potentially very useful so don't knock it even if it has potential drawbacks to work around. Until recently gconf was a rather horrible piece of abandonware designed around the idea of cloning the MS windows registry only having one per user, no reliable way of getting entries in and out, poor documentation, poorly documented source code since you have to look at that due to poor docs, CORBA thrown in badly to be fashionable and XML thrown in to be fashionable but obfiscated and so breaking all the advantages of having it in the first place.

Re:Problem: Too many useless processes

[Billly Gates]

I always wondered why macosx on similar hardware always had almost 4 hours of battery life while its not even 3 hours with linux. I think you explained why.

Re:Problem: Too many useless processes

[turing_m]

"And does anybody even know what something like bonobo-activation-daemon does?"

I'm not exactly sure, but I'm picturing Sigourney Weaver (as Dian Fossey) marching around before dawn, clanging some trash can lids together.

Re:Problem: Too many useless processes

[Abcd1234]

Or dbus, as if there were no othere proven methods for IPC, that don't require another daemon idling around and waking up every other millisecond eating away battery life.

Or you could just fix the daemons. Which then fixes every application which uses them.

But, yeah, let's just throw proper componentization out the window... that's a *way* better idea...

Re:Problem: Too many useless processes

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to shatter your illusion, but it simply doesn't matter how many daemons you have running.
The important is that they don't wake up at all, or don't wake up frequently. In that case they only consume a tiny fraction of memory but CPU is not running them at all.

Besides, the work to have idle desktop is still ongoing. 2.6.23 distros should breally show some progress, not Ubuntu which uses 2.6.22 (and especially not x86-64 !). Compiz should be disabled for power consumption tests (or you want 60 Hz CPU wakeup on vertical retrace? - note: DRI guys are improving it to use hardware retrace counters here so this issue will be solved eventually).

They, at Phoronix, should've at least ran Powertop to chech if something really stupid is going on (like some kind of laptop-specific daemon polling etc.).

Still they should make sure about the wireless radio, USB powersaving, whether high-res timers are used, or if CPU/bus powersaving mode is properly used. Results in this case can vary much depending on a laptop model. But regarding CPU, satisfactory result should be 10 or less CPU wakeups per second when system is idle (even heard about as much as 2 wakeups/second in some cases!).

All of them.

[SanityInAnarchy]

So the next question is: How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them and how much of a power savings will you see then?

Given that the stock Ubuntu (if you don't include "restricted drivers") comes with FULL source code, yes, all of them.

On a more realistic note, most people do need restricted drivers, and most people don't want to mess around with source code. But it's based on Debian, which means, for the most part, you can completely remove services you don't need, point and click, provided you know what they are.

Then again, I actually do want most of these services -- for example, the parts that make everything plug'n'play, from USB storage to wireless, even the CD "autorun" feature of Windows if you really want it. Most users won't have to think about "mounting" any more than they do on Windows, and somewhat more than they might on OS X, and that's a good thing.

Re:All of them.

[Daengbo]

Scary for me -- CDs auto unmount when you press the eject button. When did that happen? Worried I'll start getting BSODs next ...

Re:All of them.

[xenocide2]

Do your CDs often come with a write back cache? Because most programs should be able to handle a read error (file not found) situation, and it's a shitty excuse to lock down media because some program has an open read handle on the FS. You requested to remove it, the software should deal with it.

On the other hand, if your removal request conflicts with a write operation you presumably also requested, one hopes the system makes a point of honoring the write before the ejection. Sadly, USB drives don't have much they can do to stop this, aside from a transactional journal or something to at least keep the FS coherent.

Re:All of them.

[rts008]

Yes, but they also remount when you put another cd in. This can be changed.

Worried about a BSOD on Ubuntu? WTF?!?!? Quit trolling please....you are not taken as being rational or serious- Yeah, you can find app's that simulate a BSOD for *nix, but they are usually log-in screens, or screen savers.

Do yourself a favor, and quit the BSOD/Linux relationship now while you MAY have a chance to escape /. unscathed.

We (the TAU of ME(Tux Anarchy Union of Mother Earth)-who are assuming control(ref: Rush:2112 Overture) are now own all yer base!) have spoken and will be watching you!

Re:All of them.

[Daengbo]

It was tongue-in-cheek, not a troll, neither rational nor serious. No need to get hyper about it. Look at my posting history and you'll know that.

Re:All of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's including the source code have to do with what services are running by default?

Re:All of them.

[msebast]

Ah, the memories of trying debian for the first time a few years back.

If you neewbies don't get the parent post this is what happened to me (around 2001) the first time I put a CD in a linux system.

Insert cd.
Rip to mp3 (after several hours of reading howtos, compiling lame etc...)
Eject CD. Eject CD. Eject CD.
WTF!!! Give me back the %$##%@ CD!
Reboot the computer and hit the eject button quick before it reboots.

Usability has come a looong way.
Automounting and unmounting seem like such a simple things.
But it took YEARS till Ubuntu finally got it right.

Re:All of them.

[SanityInAnarchy]

You requested to remove it, the software should deal with it.

At this point, that's a UI issue. You can, in fact, force an unmount -- umount -f. (I think. It might not actually work.)

You can also find out what's using the device -- fuser -m /cdrom, or, in very rare situations, "mount" and look for anything mounted under the CD.

Re:All of them.

[SanityInAnarchy]

No one said "by default". I was replying to this:

How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them

What does this have to do with what's running by default?

You have source code to the init scripts right there. You can get source code for any C code that might be involved, if any. Therefore, you CAN disable any feature, or service, you want to -- but the act of "disabling" it pretty much implies it was running by default.

Re:Gave up on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a long time Linux user and taking a decision to move away was a no brainer[citation needed]. The user space still sucks badly[citation needed], and the kernel isn't a lot better[citation needed] - old problems, by the time they are fixed, new ugliness has already creeped[citation needed] in and the net effect is zero advantages[citation needed]. Struggling for everything is no longer my cup of tea - I got tired of it long time back. Struggle to find compatible hardware[citation needed], drivers, struggle to find software that works without crashing[citation needed], struggle to keep it running well with low power consumption (download and build/install powertop and its dependencies, look at the arcane, sometimes redundant, sometimes non-working power usage improvement suggestions) - it's just too much on the Desktop.

For servers too if you want something which just works - buy Sun x64 hardware and run Solaris 10 on it. (Don't get me started on OOM killer - I hate it and no one is fixing it - why the hell does it hand out more to applications than it has and then starts killing totally irrelevant processes - it doesn't get more brain damaged than that.)

Flame me if you will - but I said whatever I said out of the long term frustration and ton of experience. It's becoming a play ground - do mess, clean mess, lather, rinse, repeat. Day by day growing disregard for users in the name of technology is not something that can make Linux mainstream[citation needed], even on the servers.

Re:Ubuntu is bloat. Always has been

[Sancho]

I haven't tried Gutsy, but which applets are loaded by default? For 7.04, I don't think many were loaded at all.

As a fellow T60p user...

[Junta]

I'm running Ubuntu gutsy, and the T60p out of the box suspended fine. If I allow the binary ATI drivers onto my box, suspend breaks because their driver has a bug with the SLUB allocator, preventing sleep.

The other frustration is that I'm pretty much stuck using ndiswrapper, the madwifi driver is way too flaky on this laptop.

If I had a choice of equipment, would've gone with an nVidia graphics and Intel wireless, but oh well.

Precision? Error bars?

[wirelessbuzzers]

I'm having trouble believing that their measurements are significant. We're talking differences of a few watts out of about 30 watts at idle and about 50 watts at load, and their precision is in single watts with no error bars.

My laptop's battery drain rate at idle (with wireless etc off) is 11.5 +- 1.5 watts according to PowerTOP, and if you toss in a power brick it's gonna be even more variable (particularly because Lenovo's power bricks suck the big one). Percentage-wise, my laptop's power consumption varies from minute to minute by more than Phoronix' measurements, depending on whether the hard drive is spinning, how many redraws it had to do, and how many interrupts it had to service. With wireless on, it would also vary by how many packets it sends and receives.

You could make this difference significant: turn off networking or get on a private subnet, wait a half-hour for background stuff to complete, and average over a period of at least another hour. But their .00 everywhere made me think that they didn't do this.

Also, you have to normalize for CPU frequency scaling: different versions of Ubuntu probably scale the CPU to different speeds under battery+load, meaning that some would take longer and use less power (but not necessarily less energy: power = energy / time).

Of course, Ubuntu 7.10 does use more power than previous versions. It has trackerd enabled by default, which inconsiderately re-indexes your hard drive even when you're running on battery; that has to cost a couple watts when it's running. It also has compiz on by default, which wakes up the CPU and graphics card every 20ms in order to sync to the vblank; that probably costs a half-watt or so.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[dedazo]

checking your permissions 30 times a second while playing "premium" sound files?

Cite?

Windoze might spare me some power use but it will never empower anyone.

It's Windows. And it empowers me just fine. I mean, I get stuff done just fine. Like hundreds of millions of other people. You know?

Re:Ubuntu is bloat. Always has been

[Daengbo]

I just fired up my Gutsy Beta VM with everything on default (used for screencasts) to check. There are the following applets loaded by default:

• Fast User Switcher
• Deskbar
• Volume Control, and
• Clock

The only new one in gutsy is the fast user switcher, which I can't imagine uses much of anything at all. The notification area has a couple of daemons showing, though:

• Network Manager and
• Update Notifier

I don't see the major difference from Feisty. Maybe that's just me ...

Screw that, that's not old

[vivaoporto]

It's an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB OEM RAM, 120GB SATA Hard drive, and an Nvidia FX 5200 video card (I think)

That's not even close to the very machine whose browser I'm using right now, and that I use every single day when I come back home. I'm running every kubuntu version since edgy on this machine, each one making it faster and smoother to use, I'm currently on Feisty because the Gutsy driver for my wireless card is acting a little funky, but I tested it and it runs even better and faster. (Summary of the info below: Pentium Celeron 850 MHz, 256MB RAM, 4GB HD No tricks involved, vanilla ubuntu as it comes, with KDE and everything, even mplayer plays movies smootly.

fernando@OldMachine:~$ uname -r
2.6.20-16-386
fernando@OldMachine:~$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 256248 kB
MemFree: 3316 kB
Buffers: 980 kB
Cached: 109088 kB
SwapCached: 17396 kB
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fernando@OldMachine:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel / cpu family : 6 / model : 8 / model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 10 / cpu MHz : 851.568 / cache size : 128 KB / fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no / f00f_bug : no / coma_bug : no / fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes / cpuid level : 2 / wp : yes / flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1704.74 / clflush size : 32 /
fernando@OldMachine:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 3.8G 2.3G 1.3G 64% /
varrun 126M 104K 126M 1% /var/run
varlock 126M 0 126M 0% /var/lock
procbususb 126M 112K 126M 1% /proc/bus/usb
udev 126M 112K 126M 1% /dev
devshm 126M 0 126M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 126M 34M 92M 27% /lib/modules/2.6.20-16-386/volatile

(Damn lameness filter, let it pass, don't block my post, take some rest. I wish I was smart to make a haiku, in Soviet Russia, posts block you.)

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[sgtrock]

In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing continues to happen

From Peter Gutmann's excellent "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection". This paper should be required reading for anyone considering purchasing a Vista PC for ANY use.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

Tell you what - ship me an older thinkpad and I will tell you. Let me give you some advice, spelling windows as Windoze make you look like an immature jackass.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

From Wikipedia Criticism of Peter Gutmann's analysis of Vista DRM Peter Gutmann's Vista criticism has come under fire after his speech at the USENIX Security Symposium in August 2007.[3] from George Ou (ZDNet) who challenged Peter Gutmann's claims that Vista Content Protection causes so much additional CPU utilization that it increases power consumption and causes global warming.[4] Gutmann made many of the basic assertions in his paper on Vista content protection but made the more extreme statements at Usenix Boston 2007 as reported by PCWorld.[3] Ou cited data that showed no measurable power differences between 5% and 15% CPU utilization on an Intel E6600 dual-core processor and then cited HD playback performance data from AnandTech which indicated less than 7% total CPU consumption during 1080p VC-1 encoded video playback.[5] Ed Bott challenged some of Peter Gutmann's other claims.[6] Ken Fisher challenged Gutmann's claim that Vista content protection extended beyond commercial content in to user generated content.[7] Gutmann admittedly doesn't run Windows Vista and stated in his paper: "Can others confirm this? I don't run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft's claims that the content protection doesn't interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present". This statement has recently been removed from Gutmann's website but an older PDF version the paper with that statement can be found here. George Ou later reported that Gutmann relied on web forum postings for several of his key assertions such as excessive CPU and memory consumption in Vista's Media Foundation Protected Pipeline (mfpmp.exe) and AudioDG (Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation) process. Ou's tests showed that the web forum data Gutmann relied on were not repeatable. Furthermore, CPU utilization was wrongly attributed to mfpmp.exe when in fact it was actually accounting for all the CPU consumption in mfpmp.exe and Windows Media Player 11 combined.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[DAldredge]

You do know that they author of said paper didn't actually bother to run Vista on his hardware before he wrote said paper.

Sorry for the formating on the above post.

Peter Gutmann's Vista criticism has come under fire after his speech at the USENIX Security Symposium in August 2007.[3] from George Ou (ZDNet) who challenged Peter Gutmann's claims that Vista Content Protection causes so much additional CPU utilization that it increases power consumption and causes global warming.[4] Gutmann made many of the basic assertions in his paper on Vista content protection but made the more extreme statements at Usenix Boston 2007 as reported by PCWorld.[3] Ou cited data that showed no measurable power differences between 5% and 15% CPU utilization on an Intel E6600 dual-core processor and then cited HD playback performance data from AnandTech which indicated less than 7% total CPU consumption during 1080p VC-1 encoded video playback.[5] Ed Bott challenged some of Peter Gutmann's other claims.[6] Ken Fisher challenged Gutmann's claim that Vista content protection extended beyond commercial content in to user generated content.[7]

Gutmann admittedly doesn't run Windows Vista and stated in his paper: "Can others confirm this? I don't run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft's claims that the content protection doesn't interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present". This statement has recently been removed from Gutmann's website but an older PDF version the paper with that statement can be found here.

George Ou later reported that Gutmann relied on web forum postings for several of his key assertions such as excessive CPU and memory consumption in Vista's Media Foundation Protected Pipeline (mfpmp.exe) and AudioDG (Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation) process. Ou's tests showed that the web forum data Gutmann relied on were not repeatable. Furthermore, CPU utilization was wrongly attributed to mfpmp.exe when in fact it was actually accounting for all the CPU consumption in mfpmp.exe and Windows Media Player 11 combined.

Powertop Numbers

[sciurus0]

On my Dell 1420N (2GHz Core 2 Duo on the Santa Rosa chipset) with an up-to-date Gutsy, a few minutes after logging in to GNOME powertop reports 190 wakeups from idle per second and a power usage of 12.6W. After following all of powertop's recommendations (including disabling bluetooth and reducing wifi power), wakeups and power usage went down to 58 and 11.4W respectively.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[Blakey Rat]

Goddamned, just shut up. You're bringing the level of discussion here to sub-kindergarten levels, seriously.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[dedazo]

From Peter Gutmann's excellent

Try again.

Geez

[fat_mike]

Of all the stupid stories on the front page of "News for Nerds, things that matter only to really, really anally retarded linux dorks" this one takes the cake.

Power consumption....Power Consumption! I believe a lot of you have been stuck in your server rooms to long.

oh yeah I like the "I want to see it compared to Windows and OSX" guy post also. I mean, that's guaranteed to generate posts.

Grow up. Do you really think I'm going to base any business decision based on a third rate website that fell out of the loop five years ago? No, I'm going to test, and test, and test. Then I'm going to make the sales guy take me to lunch. I'm a cheap date so even Denny's would be fine. Then I'm going to grill him until his eyes go blank and he starts to drool. Then I'll ask to talk to an engineer.

Its like the OpenOffice posts. Just because SLASHDOT says its great, that means nothing. Good luck fan boys.

xubuntu

[delvsional]

Isn't xubuntu supposed to be bare and minimal? They put out a distro of ubuntu that's minimalistic already. If you don't want all the new features (I'm not upgrading just yet, everything works and I haven't had to fark with it in months) then don't upgrade or just install xubuntu or install ubuntu and turn all the extras off.

(note to self: sarcasm, also immature)

[Headcase88]

As opposed to "you do know" which is a perfectly un-annoying phrase.

(but thanks for the counterpoint all the same)

So he's been using the same laptop for 2.5 years..

[r_jensen11]

Doesn't this still result in battery life tests being null and void, for the most part? The only thing you can say is that if the battery life is just as long or longer than it was 2.5 years ago, that there have been significant improvements in efficiency. Otherwise, wouldn't the battery's storage capacity shrink over the last two and a half years have an adverse effect on battery life?

Re:FROSTY PISSS MOTHERFUCKERS

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says that's the same person who made the first post?

You must be new here if you think "Anonymous Coward" is a single account.

Umount Rainier?

[tepples]

Do your CDs often come with a write back cache? It depends on whether I have a CD-RW mounted for packet writing.

Re:Umount Rainier?

[xenocide2]

In which case, the FS is not mounted "ro."

Athlon 2500? Luxury.

[mckwant]

Similar setup here, but running quite tolerably on a 1GHz C7, 1GB RAM, 150G SATA, dual 1680x1050 monitors off a PNY GeForce FX 5200 (I don't do any 3d, though). For my money, Gentoo is far preferable to Xubuntu, which always seems to have some issue for me. Couple of gotchas:

1) With that little horsepower, you want emerge to get all of it. You have two options: Either nice -n19 emerge (which takes forEVER, but you can theoretically multitask), or start the emerge, and leave the box alone for about a day.

2) Build the vast majority of what you want at once. If you break up the emerge into chunks, then you'll be sitting around monitoring chunkN so you can start chunkN+1, and it's like watching water boil. You'll miss some packages, but compiling a few won't drive you too nuts. For the intial compile, just accept the fact that emerge needs all the horsepower it can get.

3) Use openoffice-bin. For me, oo.o took about 5-6 hours to compile, and you'll re-incur that cost every time it upgrades. I don't use it that often, so I probably would have spent more time compiling it than actually using it. I have difficulty imagining there's THAT big a difference between oo-bin and compiled oo.

4) After you're done, you don't really need to be that lightweight. I happen to like Amarok, so I use it rather than audacious or any of the lighter weight mp3 players. (Having said that, you probably don't want Amarok to rescan your collection automatically. It's a bit of a beast.)

AFAIC, xfce is in just about the right spot. Pretty and configurable enough to get it to do what you want, but without the bloat and flashiness of kde or gnome. I don't know whether I'd give it to my parents, but it works really well for me.

Ré:Néws: Moré Procéssing R&

[Anonymous Coward]

toast, still not fréé

This thought léavés a lump in my throat...évén in Mrs. Lovélacé sitting bésidé mé.

Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[sgtrock]

First, I'll let Gutmann comment on his use of various OSes:

This is just Microsoft-bashing.

It's bad-technology bashing. If this had been done by Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Alan Cox, or Theo de Raadt, I'd have said the same thing about it. As far as I'm concerned computers are tools to get a job done and not a platform for religious wars, and if something's bad I'll say so regardless of who's doing it. In fact Vista overall has some really nice new technology and features built into it, it's just this one aspect of Vista that's troublesome. And just for the record I run various versions of Windows on ... [counting] ... seven of my machines (the rest are a mixture of Linux, FreeBSD, and occasionally Solaris and QNX), so I'd be a rather unlikely Microsoft detractor if I have their software all over my machines.

As far as George Ou and Ed Bott are concerned, again I'll let Gutmann himself address this. Key quotes below:

It all started with an email from George Ou, who decided, without ever hearing my talk on content-protection issues or seeing the slides for the talk, that what I'd said in the slides was wrong. I offered to send them to him, but by then he'd gone ahead and posted his conclusions anyway, still without ever actually having seen the slides that he's commenting on. Later he changed his story to claim quite emphatically that he wasn't attacking the slides at all, which seems a bit contradictory since the material wasn't present anywhere but the slides.

...

He even went so far as to lodge a formal complaint about me with the University, although since I'd been trying quite hard to ignore him (both he and Ed even mentioned this in their blogs), I'm not really sure what he complained about (details of complaints are treated as confidential). Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't paying any attention to him.

...

Ed's tactics were slightly different. He posted his initial comments on a blog whose existence I wasn't even aware of (and therefore had no way of responding to) and then summarily declared victory in a later blog posting based on the fact that I didn't reply.

...

In this entire time, neither George nor Ed ever tried to obtain the slides from me ("I never asked for his slides" - George Ou), the actual material that started this whole thing. I've sent out copies of the slides to *every single person who asked for them*, but neither Ed nor George ever bothered contacting me to get my side of the story, or to get the slides that they were attacking. Indeed, all I got from Ed was a long sermon on professionalism.

...

Avoiding asking me for the current slides so that he can attack a ~9-month- old copy of the writeup

...

In all this mass of trivia there's one major thing missing that would justify the title that he's chosen to use: Any attempt at all to address the central thesis of the content protection analysis, that trying to seal shut (portions of) the historically open PC architecture in the name of DRM is technically a really bad idea, and one that's bound to fail. As Bruce Schneier put it, "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet".

...

Appendix: Short response to Ed's article

"Because Gutmann has no hands-on experience with this technology"

Actually I do have direct, hands-on implementation experience, which I could have told you if you'd ever contacted me about any of this.

...

"Here's the information on this exact monitor"

So this is where his strategy of going for a nine-month-old writ

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[Macthorpe]

I have been through all Gutmanns material. At the time of writing the paper he had zero experience of Vista use, instead relying on comments made on websites and in forums to base his entire paper. The fact that he modified his paper 9 months later seems a little like bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, don't you?

As for the list of 'key quotes', Gutmann fails to address any of the points that Ou actually raised, instead claiming he was working from an outdated edition of his presentation. This is irrelevant as he well knows - he needs to address why he's uses blog postings from Karel Donk and others, as a basis to make horrendously inaccurate claims about the DRM technology. A large proportion of the claims he's made have been proven false by Ou and others, but Gutmann is more prepared to attack Ou's method of arguing his points than the actual points themselves.

I have no qualms about Gutmann arguing against DRM from a moral/ethical standpoint, if he so wishes. However, from a technical standpoint his points are almost totally baseless.

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[sgtrock]

I'd say that you haven't read Gutmann's updated paper. He took input from several sources, including correcting errors that Microsoft kindly pointed out to him. However, his basic stance remains, and I think he's got a defensible position. Examples are all over the updated version of the paper, so I'll just whet your appetite with just a couple examples in the section titled "Microsoft's Response":

In mid-January 2007, Microsoft responded to some of the points in this writeup. Some of the material was new and interesting (for example clarifying just what actually gets revoked when a driver revocation occurs), other parts seem more likely to have come from Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft's PR firm) than Program Manager Dave Marsh (The Inquirer wasn't too impressed by it either). I've updated the body text based on some of the clarifications, but for things that aren't directly relevant to the main text (which means the PR-spin items) I'll comment on them here. The important technical clarifications that affected the main body of the writeup are (1) exactly what happens when a driver is revoked, (2) what happens when a tilt bit triggers, and (3) which portions of the output are affected when content degradation takes place. The content-protection specifications were previously somewhat unclear about these various consequences of the protection mechanisms, so it's good to have this clarification on exactly what occurs.

...

Do things such as HFS (Hardware Functionality Scan) affect the ability of the open-source community to write a driver?

No. HFS uses additional chip characteristics other than those needed to write a driver. HFS requirements should not prevent the disclosure of all the information needed to write drivers.

This claim is directly contradicted by a document by the same author that states:

"Such tests could involve loading a surface with an image, and then getting the chip to apply various visual effects to the image and reporting back the resulting pixels".

and then later on:

"The internal workings of the graphics chip must be kept secret, such that a hacker building an emulator could not find out the required information".

So this document, the primary reference for Vista's content protection, states exactly the opposite of what's said in Microsoft's response, namely that standard chip functionality (in this case graphics rendering in a GPU) is exercised for HFS, and that the device details have to be kept secret to prevent someone emulating the functionality.

Will the Windows Vista content protection board robustness recommendations increase the cost of graphics cards and reduce the number of build options?

Everything was moving to be integrated on the one chip anyway and this is independent of content protection recommendations. Given that cost (particularly chip cost) is most heavily influenced by volume, it is actually better to avoid making things optional through the use of external chips.

While it's certainly tempting to quote the Slashdot response "Whose ass was this assertion pulled out of?", I'll provide a bit more context. This comment, that the overhead of Vista's content protection will lead to cheaper hardware, comes from a Microsoft product manager responsible for the content protection. An ATI product manager responsible for producing the actual hardware says:

"These costs are passed on to the consumer"

"This cost is passed on to all consumers"

"This cost is passed on to purchasers of multimedia PC's"

"Costs are passed on to consumers"

"Costs are passed on to consumers, especially early adopters"

I'll let you decide who to believe.

(Another proble

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[Macthorpe]

I'll try this again - it doesn't matter what Gutmann's updated paper says. He cited his original, poorly-researched paper up for 9 months, a paper that was written from no Vista experience whatsoever, a paper that he wrote citing blog and forum posts as evidence. However, just to humour you, I read the updated presentation.

"These costs are passed on to the consumer" What strikes me is that he quotes this ATI PR man but he fails to cite where he gets this quote from. In fact, the top 20 Google searches all reference back to his paper, or people who quote his paper. Can you give me a link to where this was supposedly said, because Gutmann doesn't supply it.

Strange, don't you think?

In fact, he relentlessly hammers home the fact that /all/ efforts to protect the distribution of content have broken down sooner rather than later. Which is still argument from a moral perspective faked as a technical viewpoint.

Worse, Vista's DRM model actually actively cripples its security model in key ways. Details in the paper. There's no detail in the paper. It links to a debate on an MSDN blog about driver certification and what it achieves, and describes a completely theoretical attack where someone fools the OS in to thinking a video is DRMed content, meaning content degradation is applied to it.

Having read through this 'updated' presentation, it is still practically starved of any technical information about how MFPMP.exe works and which parts of it are vulnerable or heavy. He provides Microsoft presentation slides as 'illustration only', then uses them to try and prove a point, thus failing to understand what 'illustration only' actually means. Ou and others actually go ahead and provide real, documented evidence of the DRM system working exactly how Microsoft have said it does, to which Gutmann replies "Oh, they're working from an outdated paper". The news for him here is his new paper provides nothing new or concrete whatsoever to prove his claims.

The sooner people move on from the bumph that this 'professional paranoid' (his words, not mine) peddles, the better.

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[Erris]

I have been through all Gutmanns material. [and still agree with everything George and Ou say.]

That makes you an idiot with too much time and not enough brain.

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that makes him someone capable of critical thinking, you fucking sheep.

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[sgtrock]

Sigh. You clearly didn't read the paper all that closely. Take, for example, your first objection:

However, just to humour you, I read the updated presentation.

"These costs are passed on to the consumer"
What strikes me is that he quotes this ATI PR man but he fails to cite where he gets this quote from. In fact, the top 20 Google searches all reference back to his paper, or people who quote his paper. Can you give me a link to where this was supposedly said, because Gutmann doesn't supply it.

Strange, don't you think?

Yes, I find it strange that you can't be bothered to read the section titled "Sources":

Sources

Because this writeup started out as a private discussion in email, a number of the sources used were non-public. The best public sources that I know of are:

        * Output Content Protection and Windows Vista from WHDC.
        * Windows Longhorn Output Content Protection from WinHEC.
        * How to Implement Windows Vista Content Output Protection from WinHEC.
        * Protected Media Path and Driver Interoperability Requirements from WinHEC.

            (Note that the cryptography requirements have changed since some of the information above was published. SHA-1 has been deprecated in favour of SHA-256 and SHA-512, and public keys seem to be uniformly set at 2048 bits in place of the mixture of 1024 bits and 2048 bits mentioned in the presentations).

An excellent analysis from one of the hardware vendors involved in this comes from ATI, in the form of Digital Media Content Protection from WinHEC. This points out (in the form of PowerPoint bullet-points) the manifold problems associated with Vista's content-protection measures, with repeated mention of increased development costs, degraded performance and the phrase "increased costs passed on to consumers" pervading the entire presentation like a mantra.

I've got the Powerpoint Gutmann links to open right now. Gee, what do you know? What's that third bullet on slide 9 say? Come on, I know you can read it as well as I can: "These costs are passed on to the consumer"

quoting me:

In fact, he relentlessly hammers home the fact that /all/ efforts to protect the distribution of content have broken down sooner rather than later. To which you reply:

Which is still argument from a moral perspective faked as a technical viewpoint.

Sigh. No, it's not. Gutmann simply cites both specific examples and expert opinions why Microsoft's DRM simply does not and cannot work. Your failure to recognize the difference between wishful thinking and the reality of what has happened historically leads me to believe that you might just be a Microsoft shill.

Having read through this 'updated' presentation, it is still practically starved of any technical information about how MFPMP.exe works and which parts of it are vulnerable or heavy. He provides Microsoft presentation slides as 'illustration only', then uses them to try and prove a point, thus failing to understand what 'illustration only' actually means. Ou and others actually go ahead and provide real, documented evidence of the DRM system working exactly how Microsoft have said it does, to which Gutmann replies "Oh, they're working from an outdated paper". The news for him here is his new paper provides nothing new or concrete whatsoever to prove his claims. Gutmann quotes not only the vendors who are actually stuck implementing the hardware and drivers for this crap but Microsoft's own design documents as to what has to happen, and you're getting hung up on what Gutmann himself says is an imperfect understanding of one single executable does? Please. Red herring time.

Tell you what. You go ahead and let Microsoft do your thinking for you. I'll keep reading all of the available evidence from all sources and make up my own mind, mmkay?

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[Macthorpe]

I've got the Powerpoint Gutmann links to open right now. Except it's not linked at all, hence why I couldn't find it. I note that you couldn't be bothered to link to it either, which was very kind of you. It's not surprising that people like myself are having trouble sourcing his information. So, yes, we have a source for this, and thank you very much for the 'help'. So ATI are passing the cost of implementing the DRM solution to their consumers - so apparently we have yet another reason why DRM in Vista is insecure and badly implemented.

Oh no, wait, we don't.

Ugh. No, it's not. Gutmann simply cites both specific examples and expert opinions why Microsoft's DRM simply does not and cannot work. Except he says he's arguing cost analysis, load analysis, and other technical analyses and therefore whether DRM should be implemented or not, or whether it works or not, isn't actually relevant. At all. This is the problem - the entire paper is "Someone said this, someone said that, DRM doesn't work" which is suddenly transformed into a technical argument as to why DRM bogs down Vista, is insecure, and causes more issues than it fixes. The argument isn't even remotely congruous. There is still zero evidence in either paper for any technical reason why the DRM in Vista causes any problem to users of the operating system other than preventing the play of DRMed content at high quality unless a certain set of conditions is met.

Your failure to recognize the difference between wishful thinking and the reality of what has happened historically leads me to believe that you might just be a Microsoft shill. This is where I stopped reading. If it's that hard for you to make the mental distinction between "paid shill" and "someone who happens to disagree with you" then you're not worth the effort of teaching you the apparently more difficult difference between "shouldn't be implemented" and "is implemented poorly".

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[sgtrock]

Oh? Now I KNOW you haven't bothered to read it! For heaven's sake, do I have to spoon feed you? Here it is again, with the link embedded that you couldn't be bothered to look for in Gutmann's paper, RIGHT where I told you to look:

An excellent analysis from one of the hardware vendors involved in this comes from ATI, in the form of Digital Media Content Protection from WinHEC. This points out (in the form of PowerPoint bullet-points) the manifold problems associated with Vista's content-protection measures, with repeated mention of increased development costs, degraded performance and the phrase "increased costs passed on to consumers" pervading the entire presentation like a mantra.

It's right there. It's even hosted on Microsoft's site! How much more of an authoritative source do you need? You can see it yourself if you just go to the "Sources" subsection of Gutmann's paper.

Now, quit acting like a four year old. Pull your fingers out of your ears and quit singing "Lalalalala I can't hear you lalalalala." Next time, do some honest research before shooting off your mouth.

Re:Please read Gutmann's work yourself

[Macthorpe]

It's even hosted on Microsoft's site! How much more of an authoritative source do you need? How about some actual tests instead? I love how your absolute proof that DRM causes global warming and cripples Vista's security is that Vista's DRM implementation uses CPU cycles. Holy fuck! A program that runs and has to use CPU cycles! It's the end of the world I tell you!

Where's the technical data that this happens at any point that the appropriate media is not being played? Where's the proof? Since when did anybody on Slashdot take a Microsoft PR presentation as technical proof of anything?

Now, quit acting like a four year old. Pull your fingers out of your ears and quit singing "Lalalalala I can't hear you lalalalala." Wow... just wow. Just in case you actually forgot what you were arguing was true: "This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing continues to happen." Now point to me where in any of the items you linked you proved that assertion. Anywhere. So far we have "encryption uses CPU cycles", "DRM is always broken in the end" and "ATI passes the cost of implementing DRM on video cards to the consumer". You have failed, over and over, to link directly to the paragraphs and papers that prove that point, instead trying to lead the conversation on a merry dance in order to continually accuse me of not reading any of Guttman's papers.

So, for the final time - link me to the research that has been done, by you or Guttman, that proves that Vista's DRM implementation polls your equipment 30 times per second even when DRMed content isn't being played, or shut the hell up.

Next time, do some honest research before shooting off your mouth. Irony - not just for ironmongers.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[PitaBred]

So... in [3], what Ou is saying is that even if Vista doesn't use more "power", it's still using 3x the CPU resources to do something that actively detracts from a consumer's options in using media? And this is somehow... good for the consumer, wasting resources without giving the owner of the machine a choice in the matter? Just because it doesn't use more power from 5-15% doesn't mean that the difference between 50% and 60% utilization won't change the wattage draw. I think y'all got something a little backwards, especially when you cherry-pick your tests.

Re:AMD64 (NO_HZ now in kernel GIT)

[Big Jojo]

CONFIG_NO_HZ (tickless kernel) option isn't available in 64-bit kernels yet

It was checked into the 2.6.24 GIT tree last week, and I built a generic K8 kernel with NO_HZ. I booted it, and PowerTop says that laptop is getting about 50 timer ticks per second now (vs 260/second before). FWIW that's with Feisty ...

The biggest problem there is the audio mixer, which causes more most of those ticks. That's userspace code, which Ubuntu can and should be power-tuning. It's not like PowerTop isn't available, or anything like that!

Feel free to use MINIX if that is how you feel

[Iowan41]

Feel free to use MINIX or an old version of Linux with just plain X. But the idea that Linus should not be what the rest of us want and need is nonsense. Go do your thing in your corner, but don't expect the rest of the world to follow you.

ob reply

[Anonymous Coward]

CFLAGS just kicked in, yo!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[vux984]

Do you have a similar five click method to eliminate DRM from checking your permissions 30 times a second while playing "premium" sound files?

By not having any "premium" DRM encumbered sound files on the computer?
That would be your solution on Linux right? Since it can't play them anyway.

Guess what, not using them works on Vista too.

Yup, and you'd get a crappy estimate, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

To do it right, you'd need to run tests on multiple machines. Then, compute a measure of variance (variance, SD, SE, etc). BUT, that wasn't the point. . . it was a quick and dirty test to see what was going on for one computer. And that is OK. --AC

Re:Yup, and you'd get a crappy estimate, too.

[volsung]

That's allowing the perfect to interfere with the good. Just because you aren't going to do a full variance study doesn't mean you can't eyeball the variation in the meter while doing the measurement and tell us what you think the spread is.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

I swear Slashdot is more and more ridiculous with each year. 10 years and the "Windoze" kiddies apparently have not grown up.

Heart Attack!

[crhylove]

Wait you mean having tons of applications open on four separate desktops on different sides of a 3d cube with reflection takes more computer power? YOU'RE KIDDING!

Re:FROSTY PISSS MOTHERFUCKERS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahahaha.

Fuck the nay sayers. That was god damned funny right there.

SloshyJoshyJ -- hahahahahaha!

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[johnsie]

How many "clicks" does it take to type in that multi-digit registration code? How many "clicks" does it take to phone microsoft to get an even longer registration code that you have to type in? How many "clicks" does it take to run a Vista LiveCD?

Re:FROSTY PISSS MOTHERFUCKERS

[somersault]

You must be new here.. it is a single account, but it has many users.

Jack the threader!

[Corwn of Amber]

The only news I'll ever find worth publishing about Linux and power saving is, WHEN WILL SPEEDSTEP WORK? I mean, work as in "it works". Install, reboot, find the CPU fan off and your p4D or c2d running at 200MHz.

Same thing for hardware sensors.

Linux will be on MY desktop the very day THOSE work.

Getting that to work is the last painful Linux experience. (Well, that, and wireless. But WiFi just plain sucks on every platform as of now. Nothing works, except when the windows drivers contain all the logic and the firmware AND are programmed well enough to JUST WORK.)

Re:Jack the threader!

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy AMD then, variable speed and voltage works. fine. Oh, I'm sure it does too for Intel, except perhaps for the early P4s where it didn't work much at all.

Re:Jack the threader!

[Stewie241]

What is speedstep exactly? Is that what makes my Ubuntu run cooler than Windows? I thought it was speedstep that was making the processor monitor change from 1.73 GHz down to 800 MHz when the CPU wasn't being fully utilized, no?

If that IS what speedstep is, then, I guess Linux is going to be on your desktop soon (although this is on a notebook, so maybe it only works on notebooks - find that doubtful though). Wireless works just fine also. No tweaking. No config. Just works. Sometimes the windows boxen mess up the router (never have trouble except when I connect a windows client, and then I end up invariably having to reboot the router).

Re:Jack the threader!

[Corwn of Amber]

Yes, exactly that. I've been banging my head on walls when I was still trying to make it work. The feature was invented to save power, then was used as an excuse to make CPUs that are NOT supposed to run at their top speed all the time. It does make sense, but only when it works. It has been broken in so many ways for so many years...

Btw : thank you, Microsoft, for fucking up that, and APM and ACPI, on purpose, so as to make every "green" computer need Windows-only drivers, or else : never resume from sleep, create conflicts between the idle timers in the bios and in windows settings, making the computer crash and never wake-up, and so on.
And kudos to Intel and AMD for giving us decrementally immature tech when it's obvious to anyone what the right solution to the problem IS. Like when their CPUs went to lower clock and never would go back to their nominal speed (Celeron). Or when they take seconds to go back to full speed, making the GUI a batch environment that forget actions sometimes (some old p4). Or when they explode if they run at their nominal speed all the time, the feature is an excuse for cheap MHz "it won't burn if it runs at that speed five minutes" but when the feature does not work, like, after a clean install (of whatever OS) because you need to install a driver, well, the CPU burns. (Athlon64)

Back to the point. Ah, yes, speedstep. Seems that Linux distros think that SpeedStep should be used only in laptops, because desktop processors can happily be allowed to run full speed all time. But I don't want to hear a loud hiss all the time. So I want my p4d using its speedstep feature. Linux won't let me. So I installed MacOsX, where it does not work either. But at least I get to use an Unix that's very ready for the desktop in every way Linux is not yet.

Re:Jack the threader!

[Stewie241]

hmmm... that is odd... I didn't realize that it only worked on notebooks. I know some CPUs don't allow it - Celerons, for one. I remember trying to install it on my fedora box (which was on the celeron), and it said the processor didn't support it. From that I assumed I could use it on the desktop if I had the right CPU.

Maybe not.

Good luck... I'm happily using speedstep here, and though it doesn't get down to 200 MHz, the machine runs at 800 most of the time. I would think that as we come to the realization that no matter how green our power is, it is still greener to use less, there would be a trend towards more and more of this. We'll see... I wonder how much electricity we could save if features like this worked better in general. Doesn't seem like that difficult of a feature to implement, though that being said, it has been a couple of years since I was in UNI designing small uPs.

It may not be perfected yet, but I will say that it is much better, and Ubuntu is making strides in this direction. One of the things I love about my Linux is that it does seem to cycle down the CPU. Using XP, my notebook constantly sounded like an airplane taking off. On Linux, it is a low hum of the fan, which in some conditions is hardly noticeable. Maybe XP just eats more CPU cycles, but the conclusion I reached was that Linux was cycling down and Windows wasn't. I didn't do anything to configure that, BTW... it just worked. I guess I'm just lucky though too, because everything worked right off the install... suspend, resume, wireless, video, power saving.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[everphilski]

Windoze might spare me some power use but it will never empower anyone.

If you need a computer to 'empower' you then you have problems that can't be resolved on /.

BUM?

[octaene]

I hope that folks can/will know to use the boot-up manager (BUM) to disable many of the services that come on by default. Ubuntu, I know, is trying to be useful and all things to all people but they do start too many services at load time.

Re:Ubuntu is bloat. Always has been

[Cro Magnon]

I can see a danger that Ubuntu is training a generation of Linux users who neither know nor care what root is, and just type their password into whatever dialog box asks for it - that's setting us up for a Windows-style explosion of malware

How does that differ from Fedora, which also throws up a dialog box whenever I install/update software?

LUA and Apple ads

[SEMW]

Personalization (inc. themes and desktop effects) are per-user settings, so don't need privilege authorization.

But then, from your post, I'm guessing your sum knowledge of the Principle of Least Privilege and the idea of LUA accounts is derived from Apple advertisments. May I recommend Google?

Re:FROSTY PISSS MOTHERFUCKERS

[The Great Pretender]

Who said I thought it was the same person? Just refering to a Troll who needed to explain Trolling

Camino!

[Anonymous Coward]

FTW!

Give me more

[thorkyl]

power...

Maxing the CPU is not a usefull power usage test

[Logi]

The testing they've done doesn't seem to be useful for determining the power consumption of the system for one simple reason: If you run a program designed to max the CPU throughput, the CPU will use a lot of power. To test actual power usage you'd need to run a particular task, accomplished in a particular time, and then see how much power the machine uses.

Say, you want to compile a small program (if it runs quickly, the cpu will get to rest sooner), perform a list of tasks in gmail (where the CPU can be throttled to save power), etc.

Nice rebuttal!

[Macthorpe]

Got anything relevant to add, Twitter, or did you just want to throw a tantrum?

power sucker

[mdigiac1]

I have a macbook (yes I typed that right) and I upgraded to 7.10 a few days agi. If I can say anything about the Os it gives me 1 and a half hours tops of batterylife. I understand that there have been various updates to apps and the kernel, but I think if u get sufficient power management out of 7.04 then stay with it.

Re:FROSTY PISSS MOTHERFUCKERS

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, someone did ask about why post AC, so answer was given you see.