[UPDATE: Windows XP unknown, but Linux succesful power management results /method are lower down]
SOLUTION FOUND VIA THIS THINKWIKI ENTRY

## Hi there, bit of an introduction/background here, the question itself is in bold at the end.

First off, hello! I've been reading here a long time, and posted briefly over a year ago regarding my 570e and another model that I'd picked up somewhere, and was passionate about... ignorant purchasing meant they were far too costly to restore.

I have an X40 [1.4 dothan | 1gb ram | built in ram unknown | 8GB Kingspec MLC SSD] coming to me in the post soon, and I'm thrilled.
ThinkPad have my favourite appearance over any laptop make (including Apple), on top of that the fact that it combines an excellent keyboard with a small form factor AND battery life, are the magic three that made it such a sure decision.

(I have a hackintosh Dell Mini 9, and that tiny keyboard and screen space wear off fast for practical use, after the novelty of owning a netbook fades. Plus despite being a 1.6 ghz atom, I have a gut (feeling not based on any information or experience mind you), that the 1.4 ghz of the X40 will be faster.)
EDIT: A little researching, and that seems to definitely be the case.


As it happens, processing power isn't vital; its main if not sole use will be:
Programming in a Java IDE, ie: Eclipse; and general learning of programming languages.
Not even browsing, in the conventional flash and whistles sense, probably text-only browsing for information more often than not.
This will be my typing-away-into-the-glow-of-the-screen machine, not my let's-hit-youtube-and-watch-a-720p-movie machine.
Aside for the apps that need it ie: eclipse, I plan to have no gui to the desktop etc, using Scrotwm and dmenu on top of Arch or Debian minimal install.
That's why the keyboard is so vital, even on my Mac I've been more and more keyboardy/vimlike in my interaction. (Which reminds me - the excellent keyboard has no bothersome trackpad, and the pointer does't require me to remove my hands from typing position!)


Before I try Arch / Debian, I do have an nlited XP image. Windows 7 was easily the best OS on my dell mini, (I removed it as a matter of conscience, I don't legally own W7) and I'm trusting XP to make good with the resources for an older machine.
(W7 is ruled out for light performance due to dated chipset. I do have an SSD in this thing, but I doubt W7's expertise there will outweigh XP's with the chipset.)

I promise to cut to the chase quicker in future, but I wanted to give a warm hello with a little of where I'm coming from.

That's the waffle, here's the question:

The battery performance is very important to me. Is there intelligent power management / performance scaling for linux? If so, how does it compare to the windows equivalent?

Welcome to the forum!

as for intelligent power management under Arch Linux and Debian, it's there but you need to tweak it just as you would in XP. The tweaking is more text based but if you're working with Vim and the like, you should be fine. There are several articles on the topic from both the Arch Linux Wiki and Debian Wiki that you can look at as well as the Gentoo Wiki. For Arch Linux, there are the articles under the Power Management category of the wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Power_management_(English)) as well as the Laptop setup article (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop). ThinkWiki has an excellent (somewhat dated) article as well (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_make_use_of_Power_Management_features).

Eureka: X200s (7470-5HU), Arch Linux
Mirandra: T22 (Unknown), Arch Linux

Thanks for the warm welcome, and assembling those links for me.
I'll let you know how I manage, although I can't promise any comparisons as if the first results are satisfying; I'm unlikely to try the alternative on the basis of pm alone.
On the other hand, it's more than likely that curiosity will get the better of me.

Thanks again!

You are very welcome! No need to compare to others as what you choose to tweak aren't what others would have tweaked. Good luck and I forward to reading your results!

Eureka: X200s (7470-5HU), Arch Linux
Mirandra: T22 (Unknown), Arch Linux

It came with a foul smelling keyboard, so that took some dismantling, cleaning, reassembling - to great success.

I tried an Arch core install, and it was ok but slow progress, so I put on Crunchbang, great distro but I'm very specific about what I want... so I start stripping it down, and breaking things. I had a chance to see the directory structure of Debian... and decide I'm very much more an rc.conf man. + Prefer pacman to apt(itude).

Then a severely nlited XP SP3... surprisingly sluggish. Couldn't for the life of me get the wireless drivers (out of the three intel provide) to work. Unpromising results, and unexpected challenges considering it's the native OS with a full GUI... so I settled on an Arch install again.
The Linux kernel and community - there would only be one choice, but out of their work I can have a fast and completely tailored OS for my hardware, for free, and I often take that for granted.

This time with the net-install image, not the core install. It's well worth any extra downloading to avoid the current hiccups in updating the system / pacman.

At first the wireless would suddenly cut off - I downloaded rfkill, unblocked the soft block, and lo and behold - if a solid day of 100% wifi is anything to go by - somehow it was a permanent fix.

Desktop: No display manager. Spectrwm window manager, conky (battery/wifi/etc details) in the spectrwm bar.
Software at the moment: Jumanji browser with hints and no flash, Eclipse IDE for programming, VLC for media, Klevara for typing tuition, Alsamixer for sound, wicd-curses for network management. (I LOVE wicd.)

Only issue remaining: on boot there is a long timeout for the udev, from the readout it seems linked to my ethernet controller. In what way, I don't know. The ethernet works fine by the way.
||
V---- BATTERY / POWER MANAGEMENT ----

If the conky reading is accurate, so far it is, I am getting at least 4 HOURS with brightest display and wifi on, from a second hand battery!

The ThinkWiki entry on X40 is excellently detailed. I set my govenor to 'conservative', and it hasn't needed more than the minimum 600Mhz to do what I need, bearing in mind that I run a light system. Runs very cool compared to modern netbooks.

So there we have it - long battery life, beautiful keyboard, everything within a terminal-like tiling interface but gui apps where needed...

My ThinkPad dream has come true. I feel like an astronaut with this thing.
Tomorrow I'll tar-gzip everything onto an external drive, I would be gutted to lose this configuration.
Out of the 8GB, 55% of root and 0% of home partitions are used. Conveniently compact for backups!

I don't know about Linux at all, but for your boot-delay, look into changing the boot-sequence in the BIOS.
It may be looking for a CD or floppy drive before the Hard Disk.

The one problem; the roughly 30 second timeout wait during boot for udev events... has been solved!

For me it was:


For some reason it loads quickly via modprobe, but terribly automatically.
If your hardware is slightly different, try from this series of similar issues: Arch Wiki - 30s udev hang

Also got this running automatically onto dual monitors, after 10 seconds in ARandR as opposed to unstable results after half an hour in Windows.

Now it's complete!

I'm glad to see that your endeavour with Arch went very well. I hope everything works out well for you and Vostok!

Eureka: X200s (7470-5HU), Arch Linux
Mirandra: T22 (Unknown), Arch Linux