Hi, I just began running gentoo and my main concern has been the lack of battery life. I managed to pull 4-5 hours running windows, and now it is about half that.

I installed some power options, and find myself running these drivers:
cpufreq_powersave
video
thermal
processor
fan
button
battery
ac

According to my friend, cpu frequency scaling should improve battery life, and according to what I can tell, it should be installed. How can I check if it is working (he said it might be broken), and if it is, why is my battery life still terrible?

Thanks so much!

Ryan

The cpufreq should create an entry in the proc file system (/proc/cpu/0 I believe) which will tell you what the current running frequency is. If you are plugged into AC you should be running at full speed, it should be throttled down if you are running on the battery. If it isn't working I suspect it is because you having installed/setup acpid.

check out the laptop-mode package. you can allow your hard drive to spin down, that should help a good bit. also, you've probably got a bunch of unneccessary stuff running. stop services you don't need and recompile your kernel with just what you need for your system and you should see an increase and performance and battery life.

I have an HP nx9105 (Compaq R3000 series) and using powernowd and the userspace scaling governor I get pretty good battery life as long as I don't do anything stupid (hey, even if you do use Gentoo compiling lots of big packages is a bad idea when you have no AC! ).


Håkan