Enable/disable hardware on a laptop easily
I think (k&)ubuntu really needs a simple tool to manage enabled/disabled hardware on a laptop. Say I know I never use IRDA, pcmcia, my lan card, my modem etc - why not just have them disabled all the time? This saves power and bootup time.
What this could be is an addition to the power manager (using Kubuntu myself) to activate/deactivate certain hardware via checkboxes. This could also be good for specifying what hardware should be active/deactivated in mains powered and battery mode. If one wants to get crazy - why not make different power modes, where one can specify this kind of things? Firstly it could, however, be just a possibility to enable/disable hardware in all modes and develop this further if it is seen as important.
This goes without saying that this is an "advanced" feature - not to be shown by default but behind an advanced-button or so. If it is not in the power manager, maybe as a separate utility somewhere else, but the power manager is in my mind the most logical place for this.
Enabling/disabling means at least loading/removing modules, maybe doing something else, like running some shutdown scripts?
I come up with at least the following hardware I could possibly want to disable:
- lan card
- wlan card
- bluetooth
- irda
- modem
- pcmcia cards (1/card)
- pcmcia cards (all)
- firewire
- usb (per device)
- usb (all)
- cdrom
- soundcard (say you don't need any sound when in a meeting taking notes with your laptop)
This idea partly came up from noticing that one cannot specify the CPU frequency scaling policy when closing the lid (why not?) and remembering that some laptop manufacturer had this kind of things in their laptops already.
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I think it is a very important idea to implement.
I think there should ideally be a sort of autogestion of the deactivated periphs, if someone never (or rarely uses) certains periphs, they should be automatically deactivated, and the system garding a trace of this in order to propose an hotplug of theses if the user wants to use them.
You a little like the programs that clean your Desktops removing the unused icons, here it will deactivate the unused periphs.
By the way it shall come along with an overall way better power management support such as including all the manufacturers drivers (otherwise users have to rebuild their kernel wich is not acceptable for non-geek)
