I was working on my laptop and realize that I was seeing the errors “device-mapper: ioctl: error adding target to table” and “device-mapper: table: 253:1: linear: dm-linear: Device lookup failed” flood my logs. My CPU usage was also extremely high. Apparently this is an issue with EVMS and recent Linux kernels. There are a couple ways to resolve this.

It was a disappointing experience. A friend of mine was looking to replace Vista and willing to entertain the idea of moving to Linux. So I brought over my Ubuntu CD’s and tried to run them. Although slow, the Live CD is still a good way to show off what the desktop will look like and test driver compatibility. Unfortunately the Live CD would lock up with a scrambled screen on boot. My friend was not impressed.

Upon upgrading my laptop I decided to take advantage to the availability of the powertop application to try and reduce the power consumption of the laptop. I was able to reduce idle power consumption from about 20 watts down to about 14 watts which is a pretty significant improvement. I’ve documented the various changes I made to achieve those results.