Hey I was just wondering how you guys found your battery life to be in linux? I have found that my battery life gets totally owned while I am running linux. My battery life lasts about 3 1/2 to 4 hours while running windows but in linux my battery life dies soooo fast. Are there any power management utilities available out there for Fedora Core 6 that will help with prolonging the battery life like there are in windows, for instance, turning the brightness of the screen down and what not?

Thanks
todd

There most definitely are powersaving utilities for linux. What is the make and model of you laptop?

Laptop batteries are sparate into 3 types: Li-ion Ni-MH,Li-Polymer, as i know Li-ion battery can performance more fine in Linux than other.

Oh perfect that is amazing news. I haven't actually looked into being able to use the software that comes in windows for managing the power. My make and model of my laptop is: Toshiba Satellie A100 SK800E.


thanks
todd

My battery life, on a 5 year old Pavilion ze4315, is about 2 hours with KDE fully loaded and playing a DVD or rendering with povray. I've found out when accidentally forgetting to plug in the cord.

Some tips for increasing battery life include:
1. CPU frequency scaling
2. Keep screen brightness low and use darker colors. Black is best.
3. Turn off eye candy and set a minimal screen saver.
4. Try not to use the CD/DVD, floppy or other external devices.
5. If you have other window managers installed consider setting up a lightweight one such as Fluxbox or FVWM. You can switch to it when you know you'll be using the battery.

Thanks for the advice man. I will certainly look into the other windows managers. Currently I have XFCE installed and KDE. Although I haven't used either very extensively I, I am still trying to get used to this linux stuff.

Has anyone ever heard of APM? It seems to have some power saving functions with it.
As well I found this one http://www.buzzard.me.uk/toshiba/tuxtime.html . Does anyone have any actual experience with either one of these programs?

thanks
todd

Oh wow what? I just installed and tried flubox. That is WILD. TOTALLY different from anything I have tried before. I see why it is a light weight one lol. All that is shown on the screen in the beginning is the taskbar...thats intense. Thanks for that little tidbit man wow, I think I will have fun playing around with that indeed!

thanks
todd

Nice to hear you're giving Fluxbox a try. I'm a fan of it myself because it's still VERY customizable through plain text config files. Yeah, it's VERY different if you're still used to having icons, start menu, graphic wizards, etc. It loads fast because it doesn't have all that overhead, which reduces resource usage, which also reduces power demends. Enjoy!

The Linux kernel supports both APM and ACPI for power management ... APM is the older.

You should look into using ACPI.

I use Gentoo ... so I cannot give you exact info for FC6.
If you want to read the Gentoo Doc -> Power Management

ACPI would be nice to use, but I was hoping to find sometihng that was just easy to install, not osmething i would have to code myself. ACPI looks a little intense for me right now, I am still REALLY new to linux at the moment! You guys wouldn't have to know any programs that could be fairly easily installed and would provide some sort of a graphical interface?

thanks
todd

When I use KDE there is a power management gui, and I think Gnome has it's own also. I don't know of any others because I honestly don't use the PM gui. I stick with the list of tips I provided earlier. But for the OS to manage power consumption will depend on either APM or ACPI, which are modules that are loaded by the kernel during the boot process.

Hi,
I have noticed a similar problem with my new laptop - running Vista Home Premium with full effects, I can achieve over three hours of battery life on power saving mode. However, running F8, I can only achieve about 1 3/4 hours battery life, with cpu-scaling on, and everything else default settings. I have tried using powertop to get better power savings, but that didn't give me any hints which could get it above 2 hours. I can't see any settings anywhere to enable great power savings, and have had to resort to using Vista when I am on battery.
Anyone got any good hints / know what exactly Vista does to achieve such great power savings?
Cheers

I got about 2 on Windows and 3 and a half on Linux (Kubuntu Edgy or Fiesty) when I first moved my laptop over if I remember correctly (Dell Inspiron 1501). It was a large jump. However, my battery isn't doing quite as well anymore from use.