Its been a few weeks since I installed debian on my Macbook. First I had to take care of the obvious - getting a right click method, wifi, etc.
Now I'm working on controlling the heat, as this machine gets HOT!
I noticed that I should use acpi_cpufreq instead of speedstep_centrino, so I set that up, and then decided to take powertop for a spin. Here's what I setup from the results: /etc/rc.local
echo "ondemand" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governorecho "ondemand" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governorhal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdromhciconfig hci0 down ; rmmod hci_usbecho 1000 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs/etc/fstab
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0/dev/sda3 / ext3 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1/dev/sda4 none swap sw 0 0tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs size=64M 0 0tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=64M 0 0
I decided to remove the cdrom entries because my cdrom is broken. :-(
I also added applesmc to my /etc/modules file, and this to my /etc/rc.local:
echo "3000" > /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/fan1_min
Graphics:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption#Graphic_controllers
By far, the hottest part of the laptop is the top left hand corner, by the plug. I took a look at some pictures of the inside of a Macbook, and it looks like the wifi is there, and maybe the graphics controller? So now I'm trying to reduce the power consumed by the graphics controller, to reduce heat. I've changed the default depth to 16 from 24, and disabled DRI. Hopefully that will help. The lesswatts.org website mentions framebuffer compression, but not how to enable it. Just checked my Xorg logs, looks like its enabled already:
tail /var/log/Xorg.0.log -n 1000 | grep compression(**) intel(0): Framebuffer compression enabled
NOTE: Disabling DRI caused x to crash for me.