Thread: When to Reboot?
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VulcanRidr is offline VulcanRidr
2009-03-20 , 17:03
Posts: 473 | Thanked: 141 times | Joined on Jan 2009 @ Virginia, USA
#2
Originally Posted by RavMan View Post
As a general rule are there types of programs that need to have a reboot in order to be truly 'gone' or installed? I ask this because when I am at work and away from my charger I don't want to waste precious battery life by rebooting. As a Linux newbie I am wondering about programs that may stay in memory (or whatever) and won't be removed till a proper shutdown is done.
Generally speaking, no. Speaking as a N8x0 newbie but an experienced Debian user, a properly packaged application has a set of scripts which are called when installing or removing. There is or can be a preinst, postinst, prerm and postrm.

The prerm generally stops the application (removing from memory), before it is uninstalled, which removes its memory footprint, then deletes the files, which removes its disk footprint.

An example would be my backlight. I have advanced backlight installed and my battery drained quickly today at work. So fast that I didn't get a full day out of light use. I changed the settings in the control panel and the backlight would not go off even after I locked my N810 with the lock button. After a reboot it was back to normal. Had I known I needed a reboot I would have done it after installation but I didn't see anything indicating I needed to do that. Just wondering if there is a Linux rule of thumb that should be followed when installing/uninstalling. Thanks
Generally, the only thing you should have to reboot for is a kernel upgrade. And since the kernel is fairly static, you shouldn't have a problem with the Maemo platform.

--vr