Glad you like the write up, and thanks for your kind words!
A few points in no particular order.
Damon[ Parent ]
Just as a curoius question? which *nix are you using?
Cheers Bruce S [ Parent ]
I'm aiming to boot the machine and run it most of the time off a memory card so that I need not even spin up the hard disc very often... And the screen will be off. And unless the sun is shining I'll do only the minimum processing necessary...
I'll get this all working as well as I can on mains power before lashing out on extra PV and batteries, since every W saved may knock the equivalent of as much as USD100 off the final PV system cost...
(Currently I use all Solaris at home, on third-hand machines, some 10Y+ old, and a mixture of Solaris and Linux hosted elsewhere in the world.)
Rgds
Laptop is up and running and was briefly powered from the solar-charged battery this evening and was drawing ~21W from the battery running something near a real load (ie not completely idle), which is very respectable I think. (My aim is to get to 20W or below unless there's lots of extra power available.)
I have an Ubuntu "Feity Fawn" release with laptop-mode and cpufreqd, with the kernel upgraded to the latest-available Gutsy version, which gets me the tickless clock and a few other power-saving features.
I'm keeping an eye on what might be wasting power with PowerTop.
(I'm not posting a link since my ISP managed to drop my DSL connection today, and it'll be tomorrow before it's fixed.)