Wake your Linux box

Sat, Apr 5, 2014

I have one of the original Asus Eee PCs - the 701. I’ve put it to work monitoring the solar array on top of my house.

There’s no point in it running all night when the solar panels are idle, so it may aswell sleep too.

I found an article on the MythTV wiki which goes into great detail about auto shutdown / wakeup using ACPI….unfortunately none of it worked for me!?

Instead, I found a far simpler method using the rtcwake utility. I’ve set a cronjob that runs the following command (as root) at 6pm:

rtcwake -m mem -s 43200

The EeePc dutifully goes to sleep and wakes up at 6am ready to start monitoring again.