Gain more battery life from your Linux-based laptop with powertop

If your laptop is running Linux you might not be happy with the battery life you are getting. There are numerous reasons for the possible extra drain on your battery. Some of the biggest issues are: Hard drive spin-downs, interrupts, and power management. Figuring out how to make these adjustments to your kernel (or subsystems) to gain a bit of extra battery life would take more time googling than you would probably prefer. Fortunately there is a single application available to take care of this for you. Powertop is one of those tools every user of Linux on a laptop should have installed – especially if your laptop depends primarily on its battery for life.
Powertop was created by Lesswatts.org with the sole purpose of helping users find those programs and/or systems that are using too much power. The end result? More battery life for you to enjoy. Power top is easy to install and use. Powertop is a curses-based application so it is run inside of a terminal very much like the Top application. Don’t expect a fancy GUI here, it’s text-based but still user-friendly. In this article you will find out how to install Powertop and use it to get the most out of your battery.
Installing Powertop
So long as you are using a modern release, you should find Powertop in your distributions’ repositories. And since Powertop is a terminal-based application, I will illustrate how to install via command line.
The steps are simple:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo install powertop.
3. Click ‘y’ to okay the installation.

That’s it. Powertop is now ready for you to use.
Using Powertop

Figure 1

With your terminal still open issue the command sudo powertop to start the application. You can not run Powertop as the standard user because Powertop has to collect and modify information that the standard user has no access to. Fortunately sudo will do the trick.
What you see will differ, depending upon your distribution, installation, configuration, etc.
As you can see ,in Figure 1, Powertop has a few suggestions to aid my laptop. The biggest issue is wakeups and Powertop is giving me the top causes for wakeups.
As you can also see, Powertop offers suggestions to solve the various problems. Not only does Powertop make suggestions, it will offer to take care of the suggestion for you. In the instance above you can see Powertop is suggesting I disable the hal system from polling my CD drive. You can do this with the command:
hal-disable-polling –device /dev/cdrom
or you can just hit the ‘K’ key and Powertop will take care of this for you.
Once you take care of this suggestion (whether you let Powertop take care of it or you do it manually) Powertop will then suggest another way for you get more power from your laptop and will offer to take care of the issue for you. You can continue on like this until Powertop has resolved every issue it can find.
Final thoughts
Powertop is an effective means of helping your laptop gain more battery life without having to recompile a kernel, manually edit a configuration file, or issue any commands (outside of starting the application). After following the suggestions of Powertop you should experience a noticeable difference in your battery life.

New Windows Mobile 6.5 Phones Coming in October

The first phones with the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system will be released Oct. 6. Microsoft said the new devices will feature improved interfaces, better browsing, and access to such services as Windows Marketplace for Mobile and Microsoft My Phone.
The worldwide rollout will include new hardware as well as existing models. In North America, new Windows Mobile phones will be released by wireless operators AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless, and from manufacturers HP, HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung and Toshiba.
Marketplace, My Phone
Microsoft said the new Internet Explorer Mobile browser has been redesigned and carries a new engine as well as built-in support for Adobe Flash Lite. The redesign will make it easier to do such things as check in for a flight, pay bills, or find directions, according to the software giant.
Two new mobile services will be launched. Windows Marketplace for Mobile will provide a centralized location for finding and downloading "approved and certified" applications. Although Microsoft has said it has more than 20,000 applications for Windows Mobile devices, many users may not have noticed, because the apps have been scattered across a variety of outlets. This follows the trend of mobile platforms to create their own App Store, following the highly successful model of Apple's iPhone.
And the free My Phone service lets users back up their phone-based content to the Web automatically, so photos, music, contacts or text messages can be managed either from a phone or a PC. If a phone is lost, the idea is that a user's PC can be used to manage reloading the lost files onto a new phone.
Users of Windows Mobile phones can also customize their interface with designer themes, widgets or their own photo.

Mobilink CEO – Nominated For WCA CEO Of The Year

This year the CEO of the year category in World Communication Awards (WCA) has a nomination from Pakistan – Mr. Rashid Khan, President and CEO of Mobilink Pakistan.

Rashid Khan took over as CEO of Mobilink Pakistan in October 2008. He previously served as chief executive of Bangladeshi mobile operator Banglalink, also an Orascom company.
“In this moment of recession he has shown his skills to manage the sinking ship Mobilink and put it to road of success,” said one of Khan’s supporters.
“Excellent vision and knowledge of the industry with a vast experience in telecom industry,” added another.
The awards would be held on 25th November 2009. You can cast your vote and see the other nominations here.
The WCA are held every year to recognize the companies and individuals responsible for the innovations, achievements and great new services that are helping to build tomorrows industry.

MOVIE PLAYER 1.0

Movie Player 1.0

Movie player is an extremely easy to use software which can play almost any audio/video file in almost any format including vob, rmvb, mp4, 3gp, wmv, mov, xvid, divx, avi, mpg, flv, mkv. Mp3, aac, flac, wma, m4a, ac3, wav etc. It acts as your DVD decoder too. This player associates itself with all these formats so all you need to do is double click on the file which you need to be played. You can also create, edit, open and save playlists. There are various other options available like changing video ratio to fit it on screen, synchronizing audio/video, synchronising subtitles, frame steps etc.

Download Now

EU Slashes Mobile-Phone Roaming Rates

EU Slashes Mobile-Phone Roaming Rates

The European Union has dramatically slashed the rates that wireless carriers can charge consumers roaming across the EU's member states.

Previous rate reductions introduced in 2007 cut the cost of voice roaming calls within the EU by 70 percent. Under the new rules that went into effect Wednesday, noted EU Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding, EU roaming charges have been reduced by a further 60 percent.

"The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end, thanks to the determined action of the European Commission, the European Parliament, and all 27 EU member states," Reding said. "From today, all Europeans making calls or sending texts with their mobiles can experience the EU's single market without borders."

The Downside for Carriers

Though the new EU rules are limited to reducing the rates that wireless operators charge each other, Reding expects the changes will make it much cheaper for roaming consumers to place and receive calls, send text messages, and surf the Web on mobile phones.

"I call on the mobile industry to pass these savings on to data roaming customers swiftly," Reding said. "The commission and national regulators will monitor data roaming charges very carefully and assess next year whether the roaming market is finally becoming competitive."

The new rules come at an inopportune time for the region's wireless carriers. The EU's earlier roaming cuts have already had a negative impact on the carriers, which previously had "made margins on inter-country calls, and particularly on data roaming," said Jessica Ekholm, a Gartner principal research analyst. T-Mobile said earlier this year that "lower roaming revenues and newly introduced regulation on roaming and termination charges had a negative impact on revenues."

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Nokia E51 software version 400.34.011 released

Nokia E51 software version 400.34.011 released














This software release brings improvements and increased stability in Mail for Exchange, SMS reception improvements and stability and usability improvements for VoIP and WLAN. The release also includes robustness improvements when pressing the Home key. This software release is available through the Nokia Software Updater

Telenor Persona Karobar For Small & Medium Businesses

Persona For Small & Medium Businesses

Telenor has introduced a new package called Persona targeted for small and medium sized businesses. It seems to be a smart move and the product has good features. However the website needs some improvements.

Below is the main page of Persona which is linked from the home page. The flash design is not appropriate for business users. There is no text based information about the different parts of Persona Karobar unless you click on one of the images. I had to click twice (total three clicks from the home page) before I could get to the packages and pricing info. It should have been a single click.

There are other small things missing such as the page title does not spell out the purpose of the page but just says ‘Telenor’.

Thanks to Anam Khan for the post suggestion and information.