Wireless and Battery Life

[ZachSka87]

I have an Aspire One running EEEbuntu, and I love it. I was thinking about ways to better my battery life and I wondered...

Is there any way to disable the wireless card when it's not being used? For example, I call up a site in FF, and the site loads. I spend about 10-15 minutes on this particular page for some reason. Is there a way to automatically turn off the card until I try to go to a new site, when it would then reconnect and download the information I need?

Perhaps this is not even a practical idea...it just seemed like it would at least lead to an interesting discussion.

[Briga]

I would like to know it too.
I normally use:
sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
tu turn it down.
But for some reason, after some time the link comes back up by itself. And that's annoying becuase it does it also when I am wired to the newtwork causing problems (both connections are up and everything becomes slow).
At least that's my case on a Dell Vostro 1700 with 8.04 and backport drivers.

[superprash2003]

interesting.. you could create an sh script.. which contains


sudo ifup wlan0
firefox

this will first enable your wifi card ( presuming wlan0 is the wifi interface ) and then open firefox.. but disabling it while closing could be a problem.. but you could create another script which looks for the firefox.exe process and if it isnt present sudo ifdown wlan0 .. it could get complicated though :)