Programs preventing the disk from going to powersave mode, can I fix it?

Question

I'm running Ubuntu v10.10 on my Acer 4810TG notebook. When running on battery I often get these messages from powertop:

"The program 'firefox-bin' is writing to file 'cookies.sqlite' on /dev/sda1."

This is locking the disk from going to powersave mode.

Is there any possibility to disable constant writings to disk, when running on battery?

Answer 1

You need to install laptop-mode-tools package. See Ubuntu Wiki on Power Management.