Submitted by MagicFab on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 16:21
Revision of Optimizing battery time from Sat, 01/12/2013 - 20:02
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The following information can be used with a new Trisquel installation or while using your system to try and optimize battery time. This is mostly useful on laptops.
Tips & tricks
- Suspend the system when not using it;
- Check your power usage statistics with the gnome-power-statistics command
- Set an automatic decrease of the luminosity after some time of inactivity;
- Deactivate the Bluetooth/Wifi when not using it (for a long time). This can sometimes be achieved through a hardware switch;
- Replacing a hard drive by a solid state one should improve battery life as it requires less power;
- Disabling the sound card: this will save around 2W (up to 5% battery life):
- Right-click on the speaker in the task bar and choose "Sound preferences"
- In the "Hardware" tab, click on your sound card, then select the profile "Off"
Useful Packages
- linux-libre (homepage): Upgrade your kernel to latest linux-libre. There are two PPAs making this available (based on a forum discussion about both):
- laptop-mode-tools (homepage) : Tools for Power Savings based on battery/AC status
Laptop mode is automatically enabled after installing this package. Check the ArchLinux extensive documentation about this. - powertop (homepage) - tool to find out what is using power on a laptop
- rovclock - utility to control frequency rates of your Radeon card
Check the Thinkwiki rovclock documentation about this package
Radeon power management
Read the manual page,man radeon
. For example to enable Dynamic Clock Gating and Power Management, enter into /etc/X11/xorg.conf (does not exist by default): Section "Device" Identifier "Configured Video Device" Driver "radeon" Option "ClockGating" "true" Option "DynamicPM" "true" EndSectionsave and reboot, now
grep -i dyn /var/log/Xorg.0.log
should produce[ 17.806] (II) RADEON(0): Dynamic Clock Gating Enabled
[ 17.806] (II) RADEON(0): Dynamic Power Management Enabled
References and useful links
Revisions
01/12/2013 - 16:21
01/13/2013 - 16:43
01/15/2013 - 05:39
01/17/2013 - 10:50
08/13/2013 - 17:54
10/26/2013 - 23:00
11/11/2013 - 01:46
08/02/2014 - 01:53
06/06/2018 - 12:57