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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?

4 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Smller WM by camelrider · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A WindowManager that uses less cup and graphics horsepower may help with your battery life. IceWM is available in many distros and you can run Gnome or KDE from within IceWM when you need to.

  2. Graphics card by ballwall · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've got a T40, probably the same graphics card as the poster (Mobility Radeon 7500) and I can't figure out how to enable the power saving features under Linux. I know when I'm in windows power saving the vid card gives me a huge longetivity boost life.

    Anyone know how to do that with Linux?

  3. pcmcia by nri · · Score: 3, Interesting

    service pcmcia stop
    service lpd stop
    hdparm -E 4 /dev/dvd
    hdparm -S 12 /dev/hdaX

    --
    if :w! doesn't work, try :!cvs commit -m""
  4. Inverse results by consolidatedbord · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I currently run Linux on my Dell Inspiron 8200 and get about 1 hour more battery runtime than in Windows XP or 2000. Stock, with OEM Windows XP I would peak at about 2.5 hours of battery time, as opposed to peak of 3 hours running Linux. I have since used the i8k-tools (obviously not for Thinkpad) to control things like temperature thresholds to trigger the fans. Not sure about your laptop, but mine has 2 fans, so spinning those down if possible saves a lot of battery time. With the fans running at about 5k RPM as opposed to 9K RPM (full speed) I easily save 45 minutes, making my top peak with Linux damn near 4 hours. Your best bet to save battery life would have to be to find some thinkpad-specific software to slow the fans down and speed up at given temperatures. (not sure if that tpctl can do that or not)

    --
    while true ; do echo this is my sig; done