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Webcam desactivation

Posted: 21 Apr 2009, 17:55
by biniou
Hi !
First, I want to say thank you for all your work! I use Jaunty and I applied your patches, it is great!:D
In order to save power, I try to desactivate my webcam with MAJ+CTRL+ALT+W and apparently, it's working. But when I launch powertop, it tells me that the webcam is running 100% of the time. So, I'm wondering if your tweak only desactivate webcam on a software level, not in the hardware? If it the case, I suppose that it is the same for Wifi and Bluetooth?

Anyway, thank you again for your great work! If you know other way to decrease power consumption, tell me more! ;)

PS: sorry for my very bad english!

RE: Webcam desactivation

Posted: 21 Apr 2009, 18:27
by voria
Welcome :)

As far as I know, powertop is not completely trustable about USB devices. For example sometimes it suggests to enable USB autosuspend, but that feature is enabled by default in Ubuntu (well, I think it's enabled in every distro now). It simply fails to detect it.
So, I based my tests only on total power consumption, and it seems that both webcam and bluetooth are really deactivated when their respective kernel modules are removed. If you do other tests please share the results with us :)

Concerning the wifi, that's another story. The custom 'linux-backports-modules' package from my repository has a patch applied that enable the rfkill function, so the radio turns phisically off when you remove the kernel module.

RE: Webcam desactivation

Posted: 21 Apr 2009, 18:54
by biniou
Thank you for your very fast answer! Indeed, I'm aware of several bugs in powertop and I prefer to trust you than this software.
About the rfkill function, I though that it was supposed to turn off the led of the wifi lol. Anyway, it is good to know!
Are you planning to enable the CPU function with Fn+F8 on Jaunty?

RE: Webcam desactivation

Posted: 21 Apr 2009, 20:32
by voria
At the moment, no. Actually I removed the script for CPU governor from the 'nc10-scripts' package, because it does not work well with the new notification system shipped with jaunty. It should be reworked in some way. We'll see.