Longer Laptop Battery Life under Linux

ThinkingInBinary writes "Want easier power management and better battery life on your Linux laptop? Try powermgr, a daemon that automatically (or manually, if you choose) switches your system between power "profiles". It has support for ACPI (of course) as well as Asus, Dell, IBM, Omnibook, and Toshiba extensions. It can control CPU governor, screen brightness, wireless card, laptop mode (via services), runlevel, services, and more, and can switch based on AC adapter and battery state, load average, temperature, running processes, and more. Tests indicate that it can prolong battery life by 20 minutes to almost two hours, depending on what the system is doing. Try it out!"

Comments

Re:Not Just Laptops

[Bad to the Ben]

AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet technology supposedly intelligently scales.

In addition, you can already do things such as underclock video cards, and disable certain boards such as NICs and sound cards via software. I can't see why it couldn't be added to a power management function.

You are correct about the flatpanel one AFAIK.

Not only laptops

[ggambett]

I've recently went through this, but not for a laptop, but a Pentium 100 with 64 MB, running FC3 acting as an ADSL router and Subversion server (!).

Essentially I activated the "laptop mode" kernel variable (/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode or similar), set the hard drives to spin down after 30 seconds using hdparm, killed all the unneeded services, and cleaned up the crontab; sa in particular was causing the hard disks to spin up every 10 minutes, which I wanted to avoid. This took me a while to figure out.

Now I have a very silent, very cool (as in temperature) "server".