Laptop Questions

[Ben Brown]

I'm pretty new to Ubuntu, I guess you could call me a recent "convert"
from Fedora. So far, I am really impressed: One CD gets me Gnome 2.8
and all the essentials. Cool!

There are a couple of weird little problems that I've been trying to
work through, though. Not sure if anyone here has had similar
problems, so I thought I'd ask.

The laptop I'm running Warty on is a Dell Inspiron 8600. It's got a
1400mhz Pentium M processor, 512MB RAM, and a GeForce Go 5200 64MB.
Oh, and a WSXGA+ 15.4" screen. I'm not sure how much that will help
with my problems, but just in case...

First off, I noticed that my hard drive was spinning down after an
INSANELY short amount of time (like, 20 seconds). Some investigation
revealed that when I run /usr/sbin/laptop-mode stop, this goes away.
I've been digging through that script, but since I don't see any calls
to hdparm, I'm not sure what's causing the hard drive to spin down so
quickly. Ideas anyone?

Second off, I got the ipw2200 drivers working, but not with WPA - only
with WEP. The README for those drivers indicates that WPA is enabled,
but not supported by default. Does anyone have a working example with
WEP and Ubuntu? (I did find a howto in the Wiki, but after following
it I still can't connect.)

Lastly, my battery life is quite a bit shorter in Ubuntu then it is in
Windows. I get three hours in Linux as opposed to four hours in
Windows. My CPU is definitely clocking down, does anyone have any
power saving tips or tweaks that has helped them get more battery life
out of their Centrino?

Thanks in advance.
-- 
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Ben Brown
xthor0 at gmail.com
http://www.xthorsworld.com