[conspire] idle computer

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> Just a couple of minutes' searching finds, also, any number of simple
> tools to manage /sys/power/state and similar kernel interfaces, such as:
> 
> hibernate

This package comes from the hibernate-script tarball by Cameron Patrick
and others at TuxOnIce.  http://www.suspend2.net/


> cpufrequitls
Typo.  'cpufrequtils'.


> pmutils
Correct name is 'pm-utils'.

>   http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml

That's a third-party documentation link.  Upstream site is:
http://pm-utils.freedesktop.org/wiki/
Here's another good third-party documentation link:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pm-utils


And I might point out that there's also an ACPI daemon that logs ACPI
events to syslog by default.  
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acpid


Page about how suspend works with and without GNOME stuff:
http://wiki.debian.org/Suspend

(Many of the online documentation pages are complicated by references to
HAL, a bad idea that was in vogue for a while and is being phased out.)

Additional complication is caused by the fact that many tools optionally
support the TuxOnIce kernel patches (until recently called Software
Suspend 2 aka suspend2) that are not included in the mainline kernel
tree and omitted from most distribution kernels (Sabayon's being an
exception).

Overview of the kernel picture, i.e., the several implementations:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hibernation_%28computing%29#Linux

Wikipedia piece about the _default_ kernel implementation of hibernation
/ suspend-to-disk, called swsusp:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Swsusp
My previous bits about manipulating ACPI state directly by echoing
things to /sys/power/state assumed use of the swsusp code.