Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have heard of Global Warming, and how computers and e-waste play such a major role in adversely affecting the environment.

Most of the energy wasted by computers stems from bad power management, hard drives running when they don’t have to, keeping the monitor turned on when you’re not even in the room, and things like that.

Fortunately for us, Werner Heuser, at Tuxmobil, has written a wonderful document, The Linux Ecology-HOWTO, to guide us through using Linux to save energy.

This document has been published on TLDP (The Linux Documentation Project) and can be downloaded as a HTML archive here.

Here are some of the ideas discussed in the document.

Using Linux to Increase the Life Cycle of a Computer

Linux does not require too many resources to run, making it perfectly suited for running on old computers, even 120 Mhz Pentiums with 4 MB of RAM!

So you can use a computer that would otherwise be discarded, reducing the amount of e-waste generated and getting another useful computer out of the process.

There is a nice HOWTO on TLDP on getting old computers to run Linux.

Using Linux to save power

Linux has a number of power-saving features built right into the kernel, and the document describes the use of each of them, telling you how to:

  • Turn of your hard disc when you don’t need it (using hdparm)
  • Use your keyboard LEDs to display information instead of having to switch on your monitor (blinkd)
  • Make use of spare CPU cycles (with BOINC and distributed.net)
  • Virtual Servers running on a single physical machine to save power
  • Restoring your work after a shutdown without hibernating
  • Increase the time between hard disk writes
  • Make your fans more silent

… and many other interesting things.

Also mentioned is the extremely cool LCDproc program, that lets you display system information on an LCD screen connected to your parallel port, reducing the need to keep the monitor running.

Using Linux to save paper and ink

You can use your Linux box to save on printing, with a few simple guidelines:

  • How to print on both sides of a paper
  • Printing on A5 instead of A4, reducing the paper required
  • Printing multiple pages on a single sheet of paper
  • Editing drafts using WordPerfect before printing
  • Reading files from the monitor instead of printing them
  • Manual printer control

These are only some of the things discussed in the document.

Also discussed are

  • Using ReiserFS as your filesystem
  • Reducing the size of the kernel
  • Using BusyBox
  • Compressed filesystems
  • Cleaning temporary files
  • Reducing log sizes
  • Stripping binaries
  • Recycling computer parts

So if you want to know more about making your Linux box more environmentally friendly, you should definitely have a look at the Linux Ecoogy HOWTO.

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