[ILUG] laptop uptimes

[John Hegarty]

Just curious to know how people use their laptops. Mine has FC3
installed and doesn't suspend to disk. It could probably be configured
to work if I knew what I was doing but it's not an issue for me as I
don't use it much. Now for a short(ish) story .........

A student with an Apple laptop came to me last night (boarding school)
because his wireless access had stopped working and he hoped I could fix
it. It gets its ip address through DHCP and the address it was getting
didn't make sense. So I set one manually but it still didn't work right.
I tried a few other things but couldn't get it working. Then I asked
would it be ok to reboot and he said work away. When I went to reboot a
popup window asked for a password for the other user logged onto it. It
turned out his brother had set himself up an account on the laptop and
had played around with it shortly after the student had bought it ---
over a year ago. Knowing the student, and his brother, well I have no
doubt this is true. This laptop had not been rebooted in over a year. He
phoned his brother - got the password - rebooted and it reconnected to
the network fine.  Whenever he finishes working/playing with it he just
closes the lid. He normally has it plugged in in his room. I am sorely
impressed that it worked for so long without any problems of any kind. I
dare say if someone who knew what they were doing was fixing it it may
not have needed rebooting this time.

I'm getting used to only rebooting after a kernel update on servers here
but are there any users out there who use their linux laptop in the
manner described above? I support a number of Windows laptops here and
such an uptime is unimaginable. Is uptime on a laptop important? - Nope,
I don't think so but I'm curious to know how does Linux fares on this
one.

jh