A very simple OS to conserve energy?

Question

Suppose you're on a plane for many hours and don't have your mp3 player, but you do have your laptop. You'd like to listen to some mp3s but you don't want to drain the battery of the laptop on useless stuff like the GUI and some system processes and unnecessary use of hardware and the like. What you would rather do is run an OS which, for simplicity's sake, prompts a command line interface and plays only mp3s and can load playlists (that are preconfigured, maybe when plugged into AC voltage). I'm talking really simple bash like interface that only accepts few commands.
Assume headphones will be used.

Now the point of course is to reduce power consumption.

1) Will a system such as the one described above significantly save energy?
2) Does such a system exist?

Answer 1

1) Will a system such as the one described above significantly save energy?

Somewhat, though I doubt unless the laptop's hardware are specifically designed for such purpose it'll be significant. The main power sink in a laptop is harddisk, fan (moving parts), CPU, GPU (heat), and LCD backlight (light and heat). Harddisk must be replaced by flash-based disk or preload musics to RAM to avoid disk spinning; CPU must run cool enough without fan; GPU must be bypassed and use a smaller on-board text-mode GPU; and LCD must never be turned on, or as some laptop have a mini calculator display, use those. Unless all those parts exists in your laptop, you won't save much energy. Even better is to have a separate circuit, though if that's the case, I'd better bring my MP3 player rather than the huge unwieldy laptop; netbooks might have better chance though.



2) Does such a system exist?

Actually, yes. I remember seeing it somewhere, though I can't recall where. Digging through Google, I found some Toshiba laptop http://laptopforums.toshiba.com/t5/Qosmio-Laptops/Music-CD-playing-without-Windows-loading/m-p/17;jsessionid=3B7CF2FD5B331082173068E2C184989E The feature doesn't seem to popular by the rise of cheap portable MP3 players.

Answer 2

Interesting!



I see the problem that your mp3s would be stored on your laptop's hard drive. Just to get the hard drive working, you have to power the hard drive itself and the motherboard. Then you need a soundcard. Even if the whole screen showed nothing but a DOS prompt or similar, it still is going to use a lot of power. Basically you're trying to use hardware for something it wasn't intended for.



Neat idea though!

Answer 3

1) The system you describe will save energy. If possible, it will reduce needless reads and writes to disk, save on processor load caused by unnecessary background processes and possibly save on video card power consumption (depending on your video card). You could just try running your laptop in power save mode and close the lid (adjust power settings so that the laptop does not turn itself off), but if you really want to optimize power consumption try one of these:



2) Puppy Linux http://puppylinux.org/ - this is a minimal linux install that can be loaded onto a USB memory stick. The entire OS can fit in system memory so no disk access is required (except for mp3 access). You can retain your main OS on the laptop, and boot off the USB key when you want a minimal system.



2b) There are variants of puppy (pupplets) available - you might want to try Turbopup Xtreme "Zero CPU overhead and extremely low memory footprint":

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=2129802843&t=40477



2c) Also check out FreeDOS http://www.freedos.org/ which is also as you describe and should be able to play mp3s: http://fd-doc.sourceforge.net/faq/cgi-bin/viewfaq.cgi?faq=Using_FreeDOS/110



These systems might need a bit of help to get working with your sound card - they might work straight away, or you might need to download drivers to get them working with sound.



Have fun!

Answer 4

Hello,





From your description on what you want. You have just described linux.

I use Sidux @ http://sidux.com/ on my laptop and have used several from http://distrowatch.com/