Question:
Is there a low-power OS that will allow me to charge things from USB?
Chris R
2011-09-11 04:50:10 UTC
I have been in a situation many times where I need to use my laptop as a charging station for certain devices that I only have a USB cords for, and have to power it up just to charge my other device. Sometimes I have to do this in remote locations, running entirely from my laptop's battery. Now, I know that I can easily make a usb charger from an old cellphone charger for car or wall-socket, but I was wondering if there exists an OS that is so low-powered that it operates solely to make the usb ports of the computer operational for charging other devices. I was thinking something like a bootable flash-drive or cd, that loads once into the ram and then requires no further processing; no keeping time, no internet, no display, no reading from the HDD or CD/DVD. Does this exist? Anything similar? I am not looking for other mobile ways to charge a usb device, I'm only looking for a low-powered distro of some OS (linux, probably), to load for this purpose. Thanks for any help :)
Four answers:
Vov
2011-09-11 05:02:29 UTC
try DSL(damn small linux) its only 40mb OS,,,,,, ;)

plus u can download it from torrent,,,,

or u can just put your laptop on sleep mode,,,,,,(minimal power usage)

tell me if it helps,,,
Simply RED
2011-09-11 12:02:41 UTC
Perhaps the bootable GPartEd will do. It can detect USB flash drives and create partitions and won't use as much RAM nor CPU. That should be enough to give power to your USB device.
ratter_of_the_shire
2011-09-11 18:19:12 UTC
Still probably not worth it.



Most cpu's have a minimal level they can run at.



You can probably set something up that will set up in a cpu framebuffer, kill the wireless and pci ports, but it still ain't going to do anything miraculous. Have you tried suspend mode to see what happens?



Many new laptops will let you do this anyways. (yellow USB port will charge without booting the laptop)
lithiumMGO
2011-09-11 11:52:38 UTC
ubuntu linux last a long time for me! there are more light weight OS that consume less power and if u turn of the WI-FI and lower the brightness of the screen it will last longer


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