conserve battery in gnome when the system is idle with a little tweak

I recently bought a new lenovo laptop and decided to install Linux mint 7 on it along with vista.Every thing worked fine by default.I started tweaking the system so that i could achieve longer battery life,and i wanted to post my experiences ,thus this post.This should work well for all gnome desktops.At first i couldn’t change the time when the display goes to sleep when idle,to less than 11 minutes as you can see below:

by default

But this can changed easily by changing the idle time in gnome screen saver preferences,just open screensaver from system->preferences menu.

by default

change the “Regard the computer as idle after:” slider from 10 minutes to your liking,i changed it to 1 minute as below:

changed to 1 minute.

now computer is regarded as idle after 1 minute and open power management preferences ,now you can reduce the “put display to sleep when inactive for:” slider to upto 2 minutes.As display is the major power consumer in the laptop you can put it to sleep quicker to save more power,when ever you are away.

slider can now be reduced upto 2 minutes

For more power management options install and run powertop application and it will suggest some options to further reduce power consumption and you can also identify which applications often wake the cpu from idle,also note that it will be useful only when you have an intel® cpu.For further information on power conservation in linux visit http://www.lesswatts.org/

Split and join large files in GNU/Linux just using command-line

To split a large file into smaller ones:

Lets say you have to send your personal video file of size 100MB to your friend through Gmail but gmail has a maximum file upload limit of size 20MB.So you have to split it into 5 smaller files of size 20MB and upload it.For this you have to go to the directory where the file is stored and use the following command in the terminal:

$ split –b20m Largefilename Smallfilename

where 20m is the size of output file in MB,to split in KB put k instead of m.various other options are also available to split command,to know them just type

$ split --help

To join smaller files into a larger one:

These days most files hosted at major file hosting sites are split into smaller files such as *.001…009 or *.part01…*.part09 etc.To join these files you don’t have to search for any external softwares,you just have the commands built into every GNU/Linux system.

To join the part files open up the terminal and navigate to the directory where the files are placed and execute the command:

$ cat partfilename* > outputfilename

For example if the file names are

video.avi.01

video.avi.02

video.avi.03 etc.use

$ cat video.avi.* > video1.avi