Continual wake and sleep for minimal power usage on linux?

Question

I'd like to use a linux pc purely to collect rss feeds, but would like to minimise it's power usage as much as possible.

Presumably I would create some kind of cron job to bring it in and out of sleep mode or are there better ways of tackling this?

Answer 1

Set wake up alarm in RTC, then put the computer in standby or suspend(-to-RAM) mode. Some motherboards support waking up from hibernation (suspend-to-disk), but I guess that'll be too slow.

echo `date '+%s' -d '+ 5 minutes'` > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
echo -n "mem" > /sys/power/state

Replace "mem" with "standby" for stand-by instead of suspend.

BTW. MythTV's wiki has got some more in-depth info end examples. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ACPI_Wakeup