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

Not so great...

[FunnyLookinHat]

It still has some issues with it being set to run or not. I run this on my ubuntu setup for my IBM T43 and if you unplug the laptop and plug it back in, it thinks it is still unplugged. Thus, the screen turns off after set ammount of time, etc. etc. (which I prefer to be always on if it's plugged in). And changing it's settings are buggy.

It does get me over 3 hours of battery life, however, with my centrino processor which I really can't complain about. And with full brightness I still get 2 hours so long as I'm not doing any gaming or anything (DVD = over 2 hours low brightness)

hard drive problems and pm

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the issues I see coming up on the debian/gnome planets is developers whose notebook hard drives are dying prematurely because of all the parking/unparking of the heads etc. I have seen recommendations to disable power management on notebook hard drives for this reason and have done so on my own. The constant sound of the hard drive parking and unparking is annoying and on another thinkpad, i hear a regular soft beep every couple of seconds which is supposedly related.

due to these issues (and slashdot stories of burned cd's and dvd's expiring prematurely) i have bought some USB flash keys and an external usb hard drive (which i keep off except when i use it) for backups!

better use powersave

[Anonymous Coward]

https://sourceforge.net/projects/powersave

it has a nice front end - namely kpowersave.

Features:
1. Auto suspend when inactive after x minutes
2. hard disk settings
3. all CPU governors are derived from kernel

Re:Not Just Laptops

[arivanov]

Every Pentium 4 ever shipped has it. All Intel chipsets for Pentium 4 have it as well.

Same for Pentium 4 derived Xeons.

Same for Via though it really starts to play from Nehemia core upwards. That is if you are interested in dropping your power consumption from 7W to 1W.

Same for Opteron, but there is no proper SMP support in most motherboards. Dunno about Duron. Do not smoke that...

I run it on everything even servers. Drops idle power consumption by up to 75-80W per CPU.