Colin Fee wrote:

Happy New Year All.

I want to put my media server at home into a low-energy state when no one is at home e.g. now when both myself and my wife are at work, or say overnight when we are sleeping.

It runs Ubuntu Server 10.04.

What strategies and utilities should I use?

If it's headless, sleepd or powernap. Note their actions are configurable -- you might configure it to throttle rather than suspend-to-ram, for example, if you don't want to EVER suspend to ram (because walking over and hitting the power button to wake it up is too hard). Hmm, on that note, consider WOL. If it's a GUI, all that is ignored and you use gnome-power-manager or kwhatever. If you just want to throttle the CPU, that is on by default, look up "cpufreq governors" in the kernel docs. If you want to spin down disks, look at "laptop-mode" or "laptop-support". Also consider ricing with sysfsutils and/or hdparm/sdparm. If your overall goal is "save power", also consider output from CURRENT (post-lucid) versions of powertop, but don't believe what it says without digging into the details. Consider buying new hardware that is better optimized for saving power, e.g. replace that Pentium 4 with an Atom. Install debtags and aptitude search ~Gpower-management, ~Ghardware::power, etc. and browse through the results.