Super Low Power Linux for Laptop Media Playing?

[Netopia]

Hello All!

I've been thinking about this for a couple of years, but never took the time to even ask before. A combination of things, one of which was this thread (http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2197150&enterthread=y ) and another of which was a StumbleUpon hit of this page ( http://www.earos.dk/ )

I have a very short drive to work (about 6 minutes) and don't really have much use for an MP3 player for such a short drive. There are a couple of occasions each year though, where I might be driving for several hours straight and wanted an MP3 player. At those times, I've must used my Laptop and one of those headphone to cassette converters to hook my laptop to the car's speaker system. The only problem though, was that batteries don't last forever. Sooo... I'd wondered about a USB bootable Linux distro that might have:

[*]Additional USB device support
[*]Various Media Software
[*]The ability to step down the CPU to lower speed
[*]The ability to spin down drives and run only off of flash (USB) drive(s)

My thought was, that were I to boot to a flash drive that had the features listed above, I could create a play list from songs on the boot drive or an additional flash drive, close the cover (to shut off the LCD) and get much better battery time with no LCD, HDs spun down, and CPU at the lowest speed needed for playing MP3s.

Of course, with the price of MP3 players these days, it might be silly to go to all the trouble of doing this, but it still seems like a decent idea and perhaps with the growing size of flash media, something like this could be used to watch ripped videos on planes or in air ports (or some other situation... you name it) where you might not have access to AC power for some extended time.

Anything like this exist? If not as a stand alone distro, anyone know how hard it would be to modify an existing distro to fit the bill?

If it's all just a bad idea, feel free to say so!

Thanks,

Joe

 

[phisrow]

I don't know of anything exactly like that existing off the shelf; but there are some options similar enough to be worth trying. Damn Small Linux ( damnsmalllinux.org ) is a minimal distro ~ 50mb that can run from CD or flash drive and can even be loaded into RAM on boot. It has XMMS for media playing, and should support USB mass storage devices without trouble. I don't know, offhand, what its default CPU and HDD powersaving settings are.

You could also apply the strategy of taking a full size distro, like Debian or Ubuntu, and doing a minimal install to a flash device. This would require some attention to GRUB settings; but is very doable. A basic Debian minimal or Ubuntu server install, with powernowd and laptop-mode set up and powertop used, is about as low power as you are going to get on basic x86 without real work. From there, you can add just command line audio players, if you don't mind minimal, or install X and your choice of full sized stuff.

Not trivial; but wholly doable.

If you want the unsatisfying but easy solution, you can get a power inverter that plugs into your car's 12 volt socket:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16812120305
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16842121019
are fairly representative examples(though the second one is only 50watts, so wouldn't be a good choice for high-power laptops).

 

[Kakumba]

Well, Fedora has released a nice tool to create a bootable flash drive, so you can use that to put any live CD (not just fedora) onto a flash drive, and add your mp3s to that. Then, you could use hdparm to make the hdd spin down, not too hard.

 

[Netopia]

Nice ideas guys. Thanks.

BTW... I already have a power inverter, but this idea's been bouncing around in my head from before I had one.

Joe

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Dude just get an mp3 player.. it'll be way less of a hassle to just grab any modern mp3 player than to go through the trouble of waiting for your laptop to boot, making your laptop run the lowest power setting, and playing music through it for only a 6 minute drive. You should be able to get a 30gb ipod off craigslist for like 100 bucks then just buy a car charger.

If you'd still rather go through the pain of what you describe then I would go for DSL (damnsmalllinux). Every modern day distro ships with the cpufreq module, but every distro varies in the cpufreq governor (the application that controls the module). I know someone has already made a cpufreqd package for DSL-N so I would probably go for that distro.

But seriously man, if its only a 6 minute drive then you're going to be wasting time just configuring your laptop and waiting for it to boot and shutdown rather than enjoying your music.

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: SleepWalkerX
Dude just get an mp3 player.. it'll be way less of a hassle to just grab any modern mp3 player than to go through the trouble of waiting for your laptop to boot, making your laptop run the lowest power setting, and playing music through it for only a 6 minute drive. You should be able to get a 30gb ipod off craigslist for like 100 bucks then just buy a car charger.

If you'd still rather go through the pain of what you describe then I would go for DSL (damnsmalllinux). Every modern day distro ships with the cpufreq module, but every distro varies in the cpufreq governor (the application that controls the module). I know someone has already made a cpufreqd package for DSL-N so I would probably go for that distro.

But seriously man, if its only a 6 minute drive then you're going to be wasting time just configuring your laptop and waiting for it to boot and shutdown rather than enjoying your music.

for a 6 minute drive i dont even turn on my mp3 player 90% of the time.

get a decent player that does video/music. you could get a hard-drive based player or something that takes flash and enjoy the bejesus out of it without any hassle. hell, if you dont want something as small as some of the video/music players, get a 7" eee for cheap. ssd/flash storage will be stable. batter life should be passable (i say plug it in while in the car), itd work for watching movies and be easily portable.

buy a power inverter for your car for long trips, seriously, 20 bucks to plug the laptop in in your car for the sake of multiple hours of music seems like a no-brainer when compared to the work youd have to do to a linux distro to run it low-power.

honestly though, i wouldnt want to risk running my laptop all day in a car and having it jerked or bumped around anyway.

 

[Netopia]

For my six minute drive I just listen to NPR most of the time.

I only do the laptop thing for multi-hour drives. Also, the general idea could be used, as I said earlier, for ripped DVDs and such when you are somewhere without power.

Heck... I might even LEARN something!

Joe

 

[drag]

On long trips I'll just use my EEE PC plus a power inverter and that's that. I have a 80gig USB harddrive that I'll plug into it. I'll use a power inverter because I'll charge my cell phone and use it for other things. But if it was just my laptop I'd just get a proper adapter.

Otherwise if you do lots of trips or want something that is convient then a CarPC is do-able. Atom-based Mini-ITX boards are out now and they are _very_ low power compared to other things. A system based on that with a 7 inch touch screen you can mount on your dashboard would run you 500-600 bucks.

For a Linux laptop-based system what I'd took at is: very minimal install installed on USB with a modern kernel that uses no X Windows, no GUI. Instead I'll use mplayer because it can be controlled without a GUI, keyboard only from the command line. This way once you have the key presses memorized then it can be controlled with the display off. Once the display is turned off then you can expect battery life to skyrocket.

Otherwise maybe a device like the Nokia n810. Linux-based Maemo operating system, touch screen, mini keyboard, very low power requirements, wifi, internet browser, video, GPS navigation software, etc etc. Available for under 400 dollars.. http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16858618003

Get a power adapter for your car and a way to mount it on your dashboard then your golden.

 

[Netopia]

Guys, I really appreciate all the input. But this is something that I'm curious about (and may do, just for the sake of doing and learning). I have a power inverter. I could easily buy an MP3 player. I don't need a computer in the car normally.

If I can find the time, I'll see what I can learn and come up with to create a USB bootable Linux that puts hard drives to sleep, mounts other USB devices (for media) and the ability to play both audio and video files. Though X will be loaded, I'll close the laptop lid to kill the LCD output.

I'll post back if/when I can ever get it done. There have been a lot of ideas on here that have given me some direction. SUSE has a beta project for creating custom installs that I might look into also.

Thanks,

Joe

 

[Kakumba]

As I said, you can use the Fedora tool, which will take any live cd (Knoppix, Ubuntu, Gentoo, whatever), and you can boot from that. Its a full finction environment, so you can mount anything else that you need from there. Should even be able to edit the run levels, and boot into run level 3 by default.. or 1, if you want to be hardcore.