Fedora workstation...for the living room?

[James Wilkinson]

M. Fioretti wrote:
> Really? I asked because some years ago this was one of the arguments
> in favour of Linux, that is the fact that, when nobody was using the
> PC, the software would not throttle the CPU as much as Windows. How do
> things stand now?

To the best of my knowledge, that was only true with Windows 3.1, or
when running (at least some) 16 bit programs.

These days, things have changed. The peak power consumption of PCs has
gone up, but there have been a lot more refinements in power saving
mode. For example, Athlon 64 processors (with suitable BIOS and OS
support) can run at full speed when the CPU load is high, but switch to
1 GHz or 800 MHz whn the computer is idle.

The good news is that when the BIOS support is there, Fedora seems to
use it "out of the box". You can monitor
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq to see how fast
your system is running at the moment.

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | "But alas, we don't need a car, so I have a bus
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                      |     -- Telsa Gwynne