[KLUG Members] Laptop Linux users

[members@kalamazoolinux.org]

>While we're talking about increasing battery life... I've got my laptop set
>to spin down the hard drive when it hasn't been hit for 5 minutes.  Works
>great in console mode -- but something when I'm running gnome or kde keeps
>insisting it needs to touch the filesystem and I have no idea how one would
>go about tracking down such a program.

Is fam running? And ORBit writes OAF IORs to /tmp/ORBIT-{user}{blahblah}
 
>If I can find 'em I'd very much like to try and cleanup the code so that it's
>not hitting the disk when not necessary.  One thing I learned when doing the
>ACPI stuff was that doing an open() call on /proc/acpi/battery/0/status or
>whatever would cause a disk hit even though /proc is a non-disk directory. 
>Keeping the fd open though dup()ing it and seek()ing back to the beginning
>would let you re-read the file though w/out that disk hit.  Little tricks
>like that scattered about the core gnome apps might do a lot to keep the
>battery running a lot longer.

Fascinating.  Maybe open in glibc is checking xtab or some other status file?

>So, anybody know how I can ask my OS what in the world is touching my disk?

Have you disabled fsync() in syslog? (Prepend a "-" in front of all the log file
names.)