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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. 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.

  2. tpctl for thinkpads by doja · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since you have a Thinkpad, you should download and install tpctl. It comes with a daemon called apmiser that controls power use according to CPU usage.

  3. thinkpad utils by tellurian · · Score: 5, Informative
    Go get these from Dag's site:
    • kernel-module-thinkpad
    • tpctl
    • configure-thinkpad
  4. Read the Mini-Howto -- Esp Syslog section by Snerdley · · 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

    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).