Funtoo on a laptop best practices

[duco-ergo-sum]

I have a laptop workstation which I want to put Funtoo on.  I am back at the planning stage (after not getting very far without planning).

The SSD is partitioned as I want to enable hibernation.  However, power management (and WiFi network discovery, although I haven’t got that far yet) appear to be the big issues.

One thing I’d like if possible and circumstances allow, would be to kick off emerge, then close lid and after emerge finishes regular closed lid power management takes over :) as that would be nice.

Please advise me on best practices?  I am even willing to try systemd (please don’t get hung up on the mention of systemd, it’s just a tool that does a... many jobs).

Btw, I have deliberately left out my mistakes to avoid confusion.

 

—

Stephen.

[palica]

4 hours ago, duco-ergo-sum said:

Please advise me on best practices? 

For what? Power management, installation on laptop, using hibernation, configuring WiFi ...? Sorry Stephen you will have to rephrase your question a bit.

 

[duco-ergo-sum]

Hi Palica,

I have researched power management in Linux laptops for most the answer seems to be systemd with all its wonderful features.  I have tried masking OpenRC and predicating everything off systemd but that has left me knots too.

In Funtoo, I don’t see systemd being an option.  There is sys-power/upower etc. which offer some features.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Suspend_and_hibernate

I have read this page: https://www.funtoo.org/Power_Management

What I’m looking for is an insight into lid closed events and as the above link describes low battery events.  Laptops aren’t new and when I first scrapped these sources together and made a mess of it, I thought someone else might be able to share lessons learn or point to a useful blog post.

As for WiFi, reading on this topic has suggested that it’s not to be taken lightly either.  As that may be the case preparation is key.

So, I’m not asking about systemd despite how many times I mention systemd.  I imagine there are ways of solving this in Funtoo.  Though another has already suggested Ubuntu to me (that uses systemd to this effect [other binary distros are available offering the same effect]).  Thus as yet my research hasn’t yelded anything really laptop like in Funtoo.  I haven’t tried with Gentoo, there my expectations wouldn’t be so very different.

So to make this a clear question.  From the point of inflating the tar in the installation process.  How do you build a Funtoo laptop which functions with power management like any other modern laptop?

Maybe I’m asking the wrong question.  What am I missing?  How should I be thinking about this problem?

Thanks.

[palica]

I can share my experience with using funtoo on a laptop. I use gnome (3.20) and I am not using hibernation as I went the way of no swap partition on ssd. (8GB RAM)

I can suspend to ram without problems, the lid events just-work (opening the lid with suspended laptop resumes).

Gnome shows these settings under Power management:
 

Quote

 

Automatic suspend - When on battery power

When battery power is critical  - Power off (since no swap partition, it would show Hibernation)

When the Power Button is pressed - Suspend

 

Not using systemd.

22 minutes ago, duco-ergo-sum said:

How do you build a Funtoo laptop which functions with power management like any other modern laptop?

Follow the Install guide. After that

epro flavor desktop
epro mix-ins gnome
(optional epro mix-ins no-systemd) :)

emerge -av gnome (or gnome-light)

I don't know how to solve the "emerge / close-lid /wait for emerge to complete / hibernate" part of your question.

 

[duco-ergo-sum]

Thank you both.

 I will bare this in mind my install.

[erikr]

Hi,

I have been using Funtoo on my laptop for quite a while, also for my professional laptop in my own business.

First of I am extremely satisfied with OpenRC, it works well and if one need to verify the started services there is a list of about 25 while SystemD starts subservies and crap and produces a list that is impossible to review. I also find that openrc have the support I need to restart services easy when I am on work and need to be professional bnut I figure that is a matter of what one is used to.

Many laptops have Intel CPUs and built in graphics. This works well mostly out of the box (debian sources).

Like Palica I don't use hibernation but I think  it might work. I suspend to RAM and are very satisfied. I use KDE and have configured the power settings to ignore the fact I close the lid and I have to press the power button that I configured for sleep mode. This way I can save battery by closing the lid and thereby the screen.

For network I am using Network Manager and it works quite well. Need to be restarted once in a while after many sleeps and it is easy enough with openRC.

Wifi and stuff works well but one need to install sys-kernel/linux-firmware to get all the drivers going. I also have a initramfs as I am using BTRFS as root on an encrypted disk.

There is one trick I am using though. The laptops is not nearly as powerful as the desktop computer is. All of them are Intel. I sometimes share the / partition and mount it on the desktop, and then I mount a local filesystem on the working directory for portage. The I emerge all my stuff (chromium, libreoffice, firefox all takes quite long time).

One need to be careful with the CPU-flags in /etc/portage/make.conf though. Same princiles as is documented for DistCC. Checkout the Gentoo Wiki and the section for CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, the compiling device will report wrong CPU-flags unless exactly the same CPU.  I connect both computer to Ethernet LAN, not WiFi, when doing this trick. It works like a charm but is a bit cumbersome to setup each time.

 

Beside the usage of NetworkManager I am not doing any thing particular installation wise for the laptop but once I made some power management extras. It was a log time ago but I recall Gentoo have a very nice wiki page to that part.

 

// Erik