Linux Rescues Battery Life On Vista Notebooks From Dell

nerdyH writes "Dell is preparing to ship two enterprise-oriented Windows Vista notebooks with an interesting feature — a built-in TI OMAP (smartphone) processor that can power instantly into Linux. The 'Latitude ON' feature is said to offer 'multi-day' battery life, while letting users access email, the web, contacts, calendar, and so on, using the notebook's full-size screen and keyboard. I wonder if someday we'll just be able to plug our phones into our laptops, switching to the phone's processor when we need to save battery life? Or, maybe x86 will just get a lot more power-efficient. Speaking at MontaVista's Vision event today, OLPC spokesperson and longtime kernel hacker Deepak Saxena said the project is aiming for 10-20 hours of battery life during active use, on existing hardware (AMD Geode LX800 clocked at 500MHz, with 1GB of Flash and 256MB of RAM)."

Comments

Looks like we're going back to 1981...

[Viol8]

... when IBM PCs had BASIC in ROM which you could start instantly and (in theory) do some sort of work with without booting DOS. No bad thing IMO.

Re:eh

[Lumpy]

Actually I have a demo laptop I take with me to convince people. It's my work laptop it dual boots into Ubuntu and Vista.

I show aunt millie Vista.. she oohs, ahhs, and clicks on a few things, I explain how the pop-ups are making sure that things she does are what she wants and tries t o keep her safe.

I then boot into ubuntu and she goes, "wow! why does it boost so much faster?" then she oohs nd aahs even louder playing with ubuntu until I show her the "add software" item in the programs menu and say "you cant buy software for Ubuntu. You get it all free right here on this list, and had her install the Gramps family history program that really excited her. aunt millie installed a complex program on Linux. she cant install most anything on windows.

needless to say, she wants me to install Ubuntu on her brand new computer and blow out the new Vista home install. I have done this to ALL my family that I support, except for my brother that must access a SCADA system for work they all use Ubuntu. And my brother had to downgrade to XP because the SCADA software is incompatable with Vista.

If users use linux and Vista side by side, linux wins hands down even with the non techie crowd. The problem is that almost NOBODY is doing this.

Re:eh

[Gewalt]

My own kids' computers are cheap arse dell dimensions that were leftovers from a project many moons ago. Kids are 5 and 8. I set both machines up dual booting Ubuntu and XP. Taught the kids how to switch from one OS to the other. Both choose Ubuntu for most tasks but will use XP happily enough for that rare game some odd family member bought them that only runs on windows.
 
For the most part, I consider my kids will grow up considerably more OS agnostic than the average user, and I am hoping that will turn out to be a major advantage for them. (Oh, ya, and they also get to use my macbook pro occasionally too, but usually only when we are on the road, they like OSX the most but I'm a cheap bastard and cant afford to get them their own macbooks)

Freedom from x86

[rbanffy]

The interesting part, from my point of view, is that a free OS like Linux may foster the development of non-x86 binary architectures with different strengths.

I said this before: I would love to see a notebook chip with multiple ARM (or OMAP, or MIPS or whatever) cores that could be powered up and down depending on demand and desired power consumption.

The fact such machine would be completely Windows-proof would be a nice plus.

Re:silly...

[soupforare]

I really wish IBM's metapad got out of the prototype stage.

Re:I don't think it's the Linux

[Constantine XVI]

8/10, this mode will be hackable. And since every program you mentioned is OSS, re-compiling for ARM shouldn't be that difficult (and someone's bound to throw together a distro for it at some point)