Hi all,

After upgrading my N800 to 2008 OS, one immediate difference I noticed was that after I locked the screen, instead of it going immediately blank, it stayed fully lit for a few seconds, then dimmed, then went blank eventually.

After reading this post I decided to have a closer look at this config file:

/etc/mce/mce.ini

Under the section named

[TKLock]

I found

BlankImmediately=0

and promptly set it to

BlankImmediately=1

After restarting the N800, it now goes directly blank when I lock it, saving precious power. YAY!

Could I have achieved this in a much more elegant way? Is there a GUI setting somewhere that I overlooked which does the same thing?

If not, why not?

Overall I've been surprised to see 2008 OS seems to chew through more power while on battery than 2007 OS did, with the result being shorter uptimes - most annoying.

Could CPU hungry processes like

metalayer-crawler

be partially responsible?

Cheers.

well, I am a newbie to this, can you please explain how to do the modification? what tools you were using, and how to open the mce.ini file?

I don't think there's a GUI for it. Yeah, CPU hungry processes like the metacrawler can chew up battery life (though once it does its index and scan it should be fine).

Jason_X, assuming you know how to use the command line. Open up X term

Type in

vi /etc/mce/mce.ini

(or if you need root access you have to become root).

From there on you have to use the vi text editor (google for commands). I'll post them later (I don't have them memorized myself) if somebody else hasn't posted them. Or if you have an alternative text editor like nano it'd be "nano /etc/mce/mce.ini".

Hmmm. Hoping that's the answer to my problem, Dante_j, but I can't test it right now because... my battery is dead. :-)

In 2007 on an n800, power/center put it completely to sleep instantly; the screen went dark, and the only button that would wake it up was the (recessed, yay) power button, after which the screen and the rest of the buttons were awake, and the center button would unlock it.

In 2008 on the same unit, the power/center sequence *says* it's locking it... but as you noted, it doesn't actually *go to sleep* until the timer times out: while you still need to do power/center to unlock it, *all the buttons and the screen are stil active*.

I carry mine in a belt holster, and my auto-sleep timer is set to 5 minutes (so the thing doesn't need to be unlocked for every song if I'm listening to mp3s and don't like one :-).

So this behaviour is critically unacceptably for me, and I hope the hack you note above fixes it.

I'll find out when I get home, I guess. :-)

So I tried this mod, and it seems to be doing what I wanted.

I made 2 related mods to mce.ini, and I thought I'd mention them here for the archives:

I set PowerKeyDoubleAction=softpoweroff, which makes the unit go to sleep in (approximately) the same way, but doesn't make you hit two separate buttons. I did find, though, that if you do this, to wake it back up you have to *hold the power key* for a second, *then* do the standard 2-key wakeup.

Since this makes the unit "safe" from other n800 owners (my roomie and his grilf both have them, which gets exciting on karaoke night :-), I find I'm ok with this.

Secondly, I set DisableKPImmediately=1, though on reflection, I'm not sure that buys me anything.

But in any event, your original mod, Dante, does in fact do what we all want it to do, so anyone who carries their 800 around in something that will bump the screen or keys, like my holster, should definitely make that mod, if they don't want to go through a charge a day.

Thanks for finding that.