Getting Better Battery Life w/ Linux?

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?

Comments

Answered your own question.

[yotaku]

"and just about everything you'd expect to be able to do from a Windows machine, except make the battery last."

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.

[Skeezix]

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.

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 of our laptop batteries.

Re:Answered your own question.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I always hate this.

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.

Re:Answered your own question.

[The Bungi]

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.

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, mmm? Also, do you remember what "GNU" means?

The OP compared OS X to Unix. He's right - OS X is derived from the *BSD line, which is in turn also based on Unix, much like Linux is. Do I really have to go through this? Anyway, the fact that you pay for it or that you don't get the source code has no relevance. Indeed, maybe OS X is what Linux wants to be when it grows up.

But ultimately it is certainly valid to compare Linux and OS X because they're both descendants from the same original Unix.

I'm sure that it matters to you that you can't "download" OS X or get the code, but from a technical and historical standpoint it's a perfectly valid comparison. Whether that clashes with your "free-as-in-whatever" world view is another matter.

So next time you plan on calling someone a "troll" think twice before you post. You might end up looking, well, slightly stupid.