How can I increase time of working from my battery?
Usually I am not even able to watch film from start to end.
I use Acer Aspire 5930
OS is Ubuntu 11.04
I use Classic Ubuntu desktop (AFAIK it really means GNOME2)
I know, that:
- I can decrease brightness
- I can switch off bluetooth
- I can use Classic Ubuntu(no effects) (Don't really sure that it helps, It change appearance, though)
- I can kill some daemons i.e Dropbox
What is my question? A lot of time I work with my laptop from my home and battery is not used. In This time I want to see all beauty and speed of my system. Now I want to know:
- What can I do more to increase time of work from battery
- What kind of daemons are used by default by really I not need it when I’m not in my home?
- How can I do it automatically when I start work from battery and stop it when I stop.
Solution 1:
Since each of these would require an "answer" of their own, I will simply list them and leave to the reader to research them.
- laptop-mode -- main feature is to spin down hdd, when not in use. (You may also need to stop using journaling in ext4 because there is a bug cause unnecessary hdd use when journaling is enabled.)
- undervolting (slightly outdated, there might be a better resoruce now) http://openmindedbrain.info/09/05/2010/undervolting-in-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lts/
- Run powertop. This will give you the processes using the most interrupts/power and will also give you the number of watts/battery life you're currently looking at. This will also give you tips like decrease wifi transmit power.
- Switch from compiz to metacity, or maybe an even lighter window manager.. such as openbox. (Should be able to do this on-the-fly)
laptop-mode will allow you turn these features on and off. It will require some slight scripting though and config file editing.
killing most "deamons" aren't going to save you as much power as you think. Using powertop will help you isolate any powerhungry processes and you can decide whether they are worth having around while mobile.
More things you can do with laptop-mode:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop_Mode_Tools
Solution 2:
you may be interested in tlp. https://github.com/linrunner/TLP
Quoting from package info only
TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux without the need to understand every technical detail. TLP comes with a default configuration already optimized for battery life, so you may just install and forget it. Nevertheless TLP is highly customizable to fulfil your specific requirements.
To extend working time while on battery use the command
sudo tlp start
the magic is done by tlp then.
Cheers