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Getting Better Battery Life w/ Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the kernel-optimizations-anyone? dept.

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?

2 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Answered your own question. by yotaku · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Answered your own question. by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.