x86_64 versus x86 on ASUS eee

Use x86, hands down. I installed Fedora x86_64 on my ASUS eee 1001p with 1G of RAM and that was a mistake. In hindsight, it makes complete sense: 64-bit addressing makes programs take up lots more space in memory (because the pointers and stored memory addresses are twice as large) which makes systems with not much RAM not work as well. When I reverted back to an x86 Fedora, WOW! Things went much faster. There was oodles more memory available for applications.

Lesson Learned: Don't use x86_64 unless you absolutely need access to more than 4G of memory. And on my ASUS 1001p laptop, that'll never happen (system can only handle 2G I think) so it just doesn't make sense.

Suspend on Lid Close with LXDE

LXDE has been great on my Asus EEE 1001P. It's fast and usable. I've had some issues with it, but the most frustrating problem is that Fedora 12 with LXDE doesn't suspend by default when you close the lid. I did some googling and discovered this is known and the easy to fix it is to install the gnome-power-manager. But that kind of defeats the point of LXDE, right? I'm trying to avoid installing and using gnome heaviness to stay lean and mean and fast.

So, after lots of googling around, I finally came up with the optimum configuration which uses what I hope are lighter-weight services.

First, I had to install acpid to respond to lid close/open events (my code is based on this post):

yum install acpid

I hunted through the LXDE source code and discovered that lxde-logout uses a dbus call to HAL to trigger the suspend. I found a great blog post describing how to do this from a script. I implemented that by doing creating the following files:

/etc/acpi/events/lid (update: don't put a dot in the filename for Fedora 14+, it seems a new version of acpid ignores all files with dots in their names)

event=button/lid
action=/etc/acpi/actions/lid.sh

/etc/acpi/actions/lid.sh

#!/bin/bash

# maybe this sleep isn't needed, but just to make sure the lid close event doesn't trigger immediate wake-up
sleep 2

# make sure the lid is closed
grep -q open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state && exit 0

# suspend
dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal --type=method_call --print-reply /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement.Suspend int32:0