Running Debian KDE4 and fluxbox on my Thinkpad T410.

Was reading some articles and have the impression that some distro is more battery life friendly than others.

If this is true,

1. how can I verify if my current Debian installation is properly setup and that the battery life is taken care of?

2. which packages should be installed and what/how to configure to achieve better battery life?

The most useful command for this purpose is powertop.

It is rather not a distro thing, but how you configure your machine.
You should have installed the laptop-mode-tools and configured them in a sane way.
CPU frequency scaling should be working, at best in ondemand-mode.
Disable all desktop effects and all services that are not needed.
Disable your WLAN and Bluetooth if not needed currently.
Tune down the backlight of your display.
And, as mentioned above, have a look at powertop, it will tell you what you also can do to save energy.

P.S.: I got a significant improvement on battery life with replacing my harddisk (a 7200 rpm-model) with a SSD.

TobiSGD, macemoneta,

thanks for the advice, I will read up powertop and try to understand how to use it.

TobiSGD, you mentioned,
My Debian installation is by netinst CD as a base install,later adding xorg and laptop (using tasksel), then adding KDE4 and flubox.

However, I did NOT consciously configure anything using tools from laptop-mode-tools.

Any specific things that I should be doing?

Appreciate if you can elaborate a little here, I am a little lost.


Thanks

For the laptop-mode-tools, just have a look at the config files in /etc, they are somewhat self-explanatory.

For the CPU frequency scaling, run the command cpufreq-info, it will show you information about your current scaling situation. You can get more information on this topic here.