Arch Linux

vaquerito

Member

Registered: 2008-04-09

Posts: 32

Desktop/Laptop Linux Logic

I'm trying to logically understand and organize the way linux handles some scenarios.

Let's take a laptop since it fits most of them.
One may use a notebook while going to work on train and then in the office or maybe during a plane trip, may want to synchronize data with the desktop or backup when back at home and watch a movie after dinner. I know, he should get a life, but maybe it's not all in one day

When the laptop is carried around for work it has to run on battery, so power consumption is to be considered of course, but even the fact that wired network is only sometimes required while wireless configuration ranges from free spots to office wpa protected ap does. Here we got laptop-mode-tools, suspend to ram or disk, netcfg or network-manager for example.

Following this rationale without mentioning every possible use, it seems to me that what modules are loaded, what services running etc depend strictly on the kind of use needed but where's the correct place to manage these things?

Some services like syslog-ng, maybe cron or acpi serve the purpose of correctly managing the machine work, even before some specific user need, so we may leave them in rc.conf.

Some other like alsa or bluetooth that involve modules are use specific but cross different profiles: alsa/oss/jack are required for skype at office as well as for media entertaining but are useless and power consuming in other cases, the same goes for bluetooth and it seems odd to me to have to "sudo modprobe bluetooth_mod && sudo /etc/rc.d/bluetooth start; obexftp .... " and then the reverse each time; not to mention those like hal and dbus which aren't needed while console developing. runlevels? .bash_rc? script after login?

To manage such things I'm now stuck with custom script that do their dirty work, I was just trying to divide who goes where in a logical manner