Getting Better Battery Life w/ Linux? 69
Nuclear Elephant asks: "After a little hacking, Linux has been running great on my Thinkpad T30 for about a year now. I can talk to my cellphone and bluetooth devices, do all kinds of neat hacking on wireless, and just about everything you'd expect to be able to do from a Windows machine, except make the battery last. Even after the standard optimizations (like cpufreq, laptop_mode, brightness, turning off useless processes, etc.) my battery still only lasts about an hour running under Linux as opposed to 2 1/2 hours in Windows. Has anybody come up with some innovative battery conservation ideas for Linux? It seems to be the only thing lacking in this fine operating system." What kernel options might one look into, for saving laptop battery power? Also, what desktop settings (both for Gnome and KDE) would work best, for this situation?
Answered your own question. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like you basically answered your own question. Use the best tool for the job. If windows allows you to do all that AND make the battery last - then maybe you should just use windows.
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:2)
You will deserve your troll moderations for this false assertion. Everybody knows MacOS is not free to download like a GNU/Linux system, nor is the code available for modification. Just because it doesn't matter to you, doesn't mean it doesn't matter to everyone.
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well now. Aren't you the miguided zealot. Let's see if I can help you. "Unix" is a class of OS you can buy from SCO, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and even Sun. Linux is an OS that's based on Unix, but it is not Unix. Otherwise the SCO FUD has some basis,
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:2)
Licensing matters. Deal with it.
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:1)
I'm sure he was reaching for his pocket when he read your insightful post and stopped. Merciful heaven!
Licensing matters. Deal with it.
I'm sure you meant price, not licensing. That's OK though.
UNIX and Unix (Score:2)
Re:UNIX and Unix (Score:1)
He said "It's UNIX with none of the drawbacks". I don't see how that's unclear. "It's a UNIX-like operating system with a useable GUI and creature comforts". Or are you going to nitpick "UNIX" vs. "Unix" now? LOL!
Why not nitpick it (Score:2)
Re:UNIX and Unix (Score:1)
Seriously, calm down. I hope that you never Xeroxed a copy on a Canon copier or used a store-brand Kleenex to blow your nose.
Some brands have become generic terms. Unix is one of them.
Re:UNIX and Unix (Score:2)
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone asks, "how can I make my > work better"? Someone replys "get a >". Unless the situation is extreme ("how can I make linux run better on my 286?"), the original poster doesn't *want* information on other products. If they had, they would have asked "what notebook should I get?".
Macs may be great little UNIX boxes. I personally have a $300 Armada M300 off of eBay. It is 3.2lbs and very small, PIII 600, 384MB SDRAM, ATI GPU (slow 3D, but fine for 2D), 13GB HDD. It runs about 2 1/2 hours (under Windows). Linux is considerably shorter, perhaps because SpeedStep (that throttles down your CPU voltage and clock) isn't working.
Some people said to turn off graphical effects. This may help, but, in reality, they probably don't make a whole lot of difference.
Here are some tips:
- Get your CPU's clock throttling enabled. I believe that "longrun" can do this. Particularly on AMD CPUs (also on Pentium-M) you can choose 4 different clocks. AMD CPUs can also dynamically adjust their clock based on CPU load (they call it "PowerNow!").
- Decrease your screen brightness. This is a biggie. The backlight sucks a lot of power.
- Disconnect any optical drives (you probably don't have them connected very often anyway)
- Set your HDD spin-down options
- Suspend your computer when you aren't using it
- Charge your computer whenever you can (the less you drain Li-Ion batteries, the longer they last - there is no "memory effect", so *don't* drain them fully)
- Get a new battery or replace the cells in your battery. Many batteries use 18650 cells which can be purchased on eBay for around ~$30 for 8.
Power Management Under Linux (Score:2, Informative)
1. The screen. Blank it if possible (edit XF86Config-4) and use the darkest setting you can see with. Redundant, I know. But pay attention and actually do it.
2. The wireless. The radio sucks up a lot of power. If you are not using the web, turn off the card. (You can use the tx setting for your card to put it into a sleep state.)
3. The hard drive. Use hdparm to shut it down if no one is using it.
4. Suspend. Doesn't work on the Latitude
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure if it applies to Li+ - I believe it dos - but many rechargable batteries are cycle-limited. That means that the more often you flip them to charge-mode, battery-mode, charge-mode.. the faster you run out of cycles. Eventually, they just don't charge anymore.
If my previous laptop battery is an example of this, it was charging just fine u
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:1)
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:3, Informative)
Incidentally I have an iBook and I get great battery life under Linux (YDL 3.01). Pretty much the same battery life as I used to get under OS X.
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:2)
That said, it is quite possible (and outside my experience) that these Apple laptops have greater battery life when the system is mostly idle, i.e. doing word processing and the like.
Mac (Score:1)
or... he could get a Mac.
He's got a point. The PowerBook G3 (Pismo/Lombard) that came out in 1999, could go 5 hours on a single battery. A friend of mine had one, and I thought my 2.5 hour battery life of my Dell laptop was good at the time.
Dual batteries, 10 hours of use out in the wild.
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Answered your own question. (Score:3, Insightful)
He didn't say that Windows lets you do everything Linux can, he said Linux on his laptop can do just about everything Windows can. Linux can also do things Windows can't. :) And really you're missing the point. Many of us have no desire to run Windows or any proprietary operating system. So we want to get the most o
Use less power (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Use less power (Score:2)
My favorite line from that book : "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason..."
the usual... (Score:4, Informative)
If you buy your machine from a vendor that supports and pre-installs Linux (e.g., emperorlinux.com), they probably will take care of the necessary configuration for you.
Re:the usual... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:the usual... (Score:3, Interesting)
It may be the winmodem, or some other win-peripheral (sp?). IIRC, these load the batter a bit, and if they default to on, that would be a problem.
Re:the usual... (Score:1)
more ram, cause avoiding the swapping all the time
will surely help the disk to stay longer in spindowns.
nowaday the kernel can cache most of the files you use
so the bigger ram the bigger cache you will have the less
power it needs to spin
in our office we also noticed that the laptops coolers
are spinning way to much e.g. trying to keep the machine
as cold as possible, you can bring the temperature limits
a bit up (ofcourse don't let the machine burn in hour hands
Re:the usual... (Score:1)
You need the "Laptop mode" kernel patch. Google for it. It batches writes to the HD, so if you combine that with some agressive hdparm stuff you can get the hd to spin down.
My laptop can easily spin the HD down for long periods of time if I'm just web browsing (as someone else says, set the on-disk cache to 0KB)
Smller WM (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Smller WM (Score:2)
Throttling Down? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Throttling Down? (Score:2)
tpctl for thinkpads (Score:5, Informative)
Re:tpctl for thinkpads (Score:3, Informative)
Graphics card (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone know how to do that with Linux?
Re:Graphics card (Score:3, Informative)
Turn Off Eye Candy (Score:3, Informative)
:)
Visual and audio effects mean processing time, and CPU time uses battery power. Also look into unloading modules that you aren't using, especially wireless network-related modules.
Alternatively, you could go the way of many /dotters and get a Mac. I'm a Unix geek who just got a used IBook and I love it.
Re:Turn Off Eye Candy (Score:3, Informative)
This is not always correct, it depends on what eye candy operations are implemented efficiently on your hardware. For example, suppose you turn on the nvidia cursor shadow extension. Does it take extra power? No, because the nvidia gpu trivially can compute it in hardware for 1/zillionth of a watt. Now suppose someone does write a non-nvidia X extension that emulates this inelegantly by doing lots of screen blits and softwa
Re:Turn Off Eye Candy (Score:2)
Re:Turn Off Eye Candy (Score:1)
I must admit, nothing beats OS X though. Too bad there is no x86 port of it...........
I know it's not Linux specific but... (Score:3, Informative)
And, as was hinted at by others, take off anything that will cause your processor to do more work than you need. This means removing big GUI's, and use basic software (like anything but Gnome and KDE, Firefox instead of Mozilla Suite, Mutt instead of Evolution, etc.)
thinkpad utils (Score:5, Informative)
HD sleep (Score:3, Informative)
Re:HD sleep (Score:4, Informative)
PLEASE mod parent and gparent Up! (Score:1)
Read the Mini-Howto -- Esp Syslog section (Score:5, Informative)
There is the "Battery Powered Mini-HOWTO" up on the Linux Documentation Project site: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Battery-Powered/index.ht ml [tldp.org]
Of course, you probably looked there first before you asked Slashdot :)
Seriously, read the section on syslogd(8). In addition to their suggestions, we have also setup a central log server which allows logging to only go over the network, and not to the local disk at all.
If you are in a LAN (or wireless) environment, you might want to consider that although the wireless might cost you more powering the NIC than it would hitting the disk (after you disabled syncing).
Re:Read the Mini-Howto -- Esp Syslog section (Score:3, Interesting)
I recommend reading up on some of the tricks that embedded people (like me) use. There are a ton of ways t
Read this (Score:1)
pcmcia (Score:3, Interesting)
service lpd stop
hdparm -E 4
hdparm -S 12
Tweak your applications (Score:2, Interesting)
ACPI (Score:5, Informative)
Lindows for Laptops (Score:2, Informative)
Such as Lindows for Laptops [lindows.com].
It has built-in power management features and can even be bought pre-installed on a number of machines.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Lindows, I run Windows and I don't even have a notebook computer. But this is the one commercial mobile Linux solution that I've heard of.
Inverse results (Score:3, Interesting)
Fans are not likely the issue (Score:5, Informative)
But I can confirm that my battery life with my I8200 is comparable to, if not better than, under Windows.
Power management features I use:
cpufreq (Both speedstep-ich and p4-clockmod as modules - Load speedstep-ich, set the "powersave" governor to step down the voltage/speed, then load p4-clockmod to drop the clock speed even more. I've been running my P4-M 1.7 at 600 MHz lately, it's more than responsive enough for AIM and web browsing.)
nvclock (Does not support mobile chipsets out of the box, but I disabled the code that causes nvclock to not touch mobile chipsets and it works fine on my GeForce 4 Go 440. I'm assuming the devs of nvclock disabled this because it's an overclocking tool and overclocking mobile GPUs is a bad idea, they forgot that mobile users might actually want to UNDERCLOCK their GPUs...)
Get LOTS of memory. Enough to allow you to disable swap. If you have swap enabled, it seems that even with an idle machine, it'll page stuff in/out just enough to FUBAR any attempts to make the HD sleep.
buy more ram (Score:2, Interesting)
APCI or APM? (Score:2, Informative)
ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT0] (battery present)
ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery absent)
ACPI: Lid Switch [LID]
ACPI: Power Button (CM) [PBTN]
ACPI: Sleep Button (CM) [SBTN]
ACPI: Proc
Valid comparison? (Score:1)
Let's compare apples to apples. Mine's bigger. MUWAHAHAHA!