Kill The Screensaver, Save The World

A screensaver wastes power when it shows you the pretty graphics. It keeps the screen out of power-save mode and keeps the CPU and GPU active.

This is my attempt to quantify just how much power the screensaver wastes for just one average Ubuntu user. Using the default Ubuntu setup the screensaver starts after 10 minutes as a blank screen and it asks the monitor to sleep after 40 minutes. *Diff = difference between device in normal operation and power save mode in watts.
Variables

• % CRT Use: 50%
• Diff CRT: 60
• Diff LCD: 25
• Time screensaver is active a day: 2 hour

.50 * 60 + .50 * 25 = Diff Avg Monitor 42.5 Watts (also Watt hours)
Total for one user per day is 85 Watt hours.
That is 31 KwH for a year. Or at $ .15 a KwH, $5.

Variables

• User Base Of Ubuntu Desktop: 10 Million
• Diff Screensaver: 85 Watt-hours (a day)

That is 850 MWH (Million Watts) a day for all Ubuntu users.
That is 31 GWH a year. Or somewhere in the range of $46,537,500 a year.

Please if you can get more accurate variables please tell me about them, also send corrections. Kill the screensaver, Save the World.

You eat pieces of FUD for breakfast?

Response to "I eat FUD like you for breakfest"

I suppose I am one of the vocal minority you are speaking about. A little known guy by the nickname of RMS is another. And yes there are others that go a little overboard.. on both sides of this debate.

First off, we obviously do care about patents. Ubuntu doesn't play MP3s out of the box. And no, it isn't just because we like Ogg (or FLAC) better.

Let me make this clear. In a patent-free world I would still not like Mono installed by default in Ubuntu. Why? Because we let Microsoft be the leader, we follow. They create .NET, we follow. They modify it, we follow again. We do need to follow Microsoft on some things in order to compete (like opening .docs) but we should choose our battles wisely.

I, however, am completely fine with Mono "stealing" development resources from all the other programming languages. Because,it's not stealing resources, someone is volunteering or being paid to do the work and odds are they are having fun doing it.

It is their choice if they want to work on Mono or a complete reimplementation of a good Mono application in C++ so it's faster, uses less memory, and is in their favourite language.

You eat pieces of FUD for breakfast? Perhaps you should stop following Microsoft.

Teach Courses. Share The Freedom.

I've been teaching courses at the local library for some time now (almost a year now). I've been meaning to make my materials public. Here are a few of them.

Course - "The Best Free Stuff on The Internet: Introduction to Free and Open Source Software"

Description
Need new computer software that won’t break the bank? A quiet revolution is growing in the world of computer software. You may have heard of it simply as a source of software for free, but it’s far more than that. This program introduces some popular free software like Firefox, OpenOffice and Linux. Come learn about these reliable, easy-to-use, and, most importantly, free software.

Presentation BestFreeStuff.odp
Before you present review all linked sites for familiarity, yes I provide links to the free stuff more than describing it.

Handout BestFreeStuff.odt
Change the local resources at the bottom before use!

Course - "Safely Exploring the Internet with Mozilla Firefox"

Description
Learn how to browse the Web like a pro with the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser. You will learn how Firefox protects you from threats, techniques for searching and browsing the Web, and tips to keep your browsing experience organized.

Presentation FirefoxSecurity.odp
This just covers a couple key Firefox Security features. I usually do the rest as a hands on exercise having the students do various things. Look here for ideas.

Here is a starting point, go out and teach a course! Also, looking for suggestions/comments for my current materials.

Announcing Mirrors Project

Mirrors is my attempt at creating a remix or respin of Ubuntu. Although this first phase is nothing more than a customization of the included packages and changing of default themes and wallpaper. The goal for this release was to get in the range of using 100 mb of ram in the initial liveCD boot. It is close, but still needs work.

It currently only exists as a script for use by UCK. Among the major things it removes are:

• Evolution
  
• Tomboy
• F-Spot
• Pulseaudio
• Gnome-pilot
• Screensavers
• Bluetooth
• Virtual Terminals 2 - 6. Saves about 10 megs on livecd

This is not necessarily because I think these are "bad". It's just I don't use them and am tired of them taking up space / memory / processor cycles. Download it from here.

Fedora Beta Released

If you've got some time go check out and test Fedora Beta. It was released today and incorporates some very exciting features. Particularly for me:

"Further improvements to the boot process that include NVidia, ATI, and Intel video adapters, using the revolutionary kernel mode setting feature in an effort to cut boot time and provide pleasing visuals." - and lay the ground work for better 3d and video performance, better suspend and resume, not running X as root, and a bunch more.

Ubuntu will likely adopt kernel mode setting in the Karmic Koala release but if we test it and find the bugs now we could get less bugs later. You can read the Red Hat Press Release here. And grab the torrents here.