Details

Linux on Laptops: Power management, wireless networks and fingerprint authentication

von Timo Hönig (SuSE Linux GmbH)

Mittwoch, 30.05.2007, Saal 5: Wiesbaden, 16:00-17:00 Uhr

Hardware is on the move. New standards in both the software and hardware sector demand a lot from GNU/Linux, especially on laptops.

The power management stack is about to mature. Different possibilities for suspending the system (suspend-to-disk, suspend-to-RAM, suspend-to-both) and different methods of CPU frequency scaling offer a variety of ways to reduce power consumption and extend battery life. As hardware is complex, and often requires delicate control by the operating system, it needs a complex software framework to achieve the intended results. It is up to the kernel and user space to make the user experience a good one. Developers of all parts of the community have to collaborate in a distribution agnostic way.

The wireless stack is still very fragile and creating a universally valid framework is a painstaking task. A new approach to control access to wireless networks is NetworkManager. It allows users to connect easily and switch wireless networks. NetworkManager handles user interaction to supply passphrases for encrypted networks (WEP, WPA).

Both the power management and wireless stack now use HAL and D-Bus to a high extent.

Laptop vendors have started to ship their systems with fingerprint readers to allow users to authenticate using a fingerprint rather than supplying a password. The Linux desktop is ready to support this in a very convenient way: The ThinkFinger project supports the most commonly used fingerprint readers and makes it easier for users to login, unlock their screensaver and run applications in the context of the system administrator. All authentication is performed with a single swipe of the finger.

Über den Autor Timo Hönig:

Timo Hönig has studied Computer Science in Augsburg, Germany. He has lived in the world of networks, desktops, Open Source and Unix for over fifteen years now. He wrote his diploma thesis about an input abstraction layer for GNU/Linux.

He is working as a software engineer for SuSE/Novell at the research and development department for mobile devices. He joined Novell/SUSE in 2004 and has a devotion for the smooth integration of the SUSE distributions on laptops. Occasionally, he contributes articles for the Linux Magazine.