On 28-May-06, at 8:59 PM, Tracy Di Marco White wrote:

> I'm going to be spending the next week at a conference, and I know
> I won't always be able to be near an outlet.  A co-worker running
> one of those other OSs (his is from Redmond) with the same laptop
> can get nearly double the time out of his two batteries that I can.
>
> What tips do people have for making your battery last as long as
> possible, when you want to use the computer?
>
> I have an atheros wireless card, which I guess I can't do powersave
> with.  I have radeontools installed for shutting off the backlight,
> I have estd set up to adjust the CPU frequency down when I'm not on
> AC. I mount / (my only partition) with noatime, nodevmtime, and soft
> dependencies.
>
> I've got a Latitude D600. I'm running a few days old current.

I have ACPI S3 working on the D600 if you're interested.

Apart from that, on my Vaio I do things with powerd such as dimming  
the screen on battery, slowing down the processor, using atactl  
setstandby/setidle, shutting off cron, and restarting syslogd to use  
an alternate config file that doesn't write to any files, only ttyE7.

I use powersave with ral/ural when acadapter is disconnected also; I  
suspect that this will be a huge drain on your battery if ath doesn't  
support it. You may also want to ifconfig bge0 down (as Windows does)  
when using the wireless adapter on battery.

I'll have to check tomorrow to see if radeontool can dim the display  
without turning it off completely. I never tried.

Cheers,
Jared