Improve Your Linux Laptop Battery Life As soon as Ubuntu MATE 16.04 was released on April 21, 2016, I spent a couple of hours backing up my laptop's hard drive and converting from Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.3. Ubuntu MATE 16.04 is now on my podcast production machine, a System76 Galago Ultrapro. My initial observations were these: The MATE desktop is a joy to use. 40% improved battery life! Bluetooth connection to Sony headphones works a little differently than under Mint Cinnamon. Don't have theMaker (cross-platform content management software) working yet. Everything else works perfectly. 40% improvement in battery life? How did that happen? No, although the screen shot above shows over 25 hours of battery life, that's an unrealistic expectation. I did, however, see an improvement in battery life from 3.5 hours to over 5 hours -- a 42% increase -- by simply replacing Linux Mint with Ubuntu MATE. In addition to explaining how this can happen, this article provides some other strategies for improving the amount of time your battery-powered PC can run unplugged.

Strategies for Improving Battery Life Today you can install Linux on almost any computer hardware -- Mac or Windows PC. With a computer, like the designed-for-Linux System76 or Entroware lines, you can be sure you'll have the "just works" experience with whatever version of Linux you choose to install. But whether you choose a computer with Linux pre-installed, or you install it on hardware you already own, out-of-the-box laptop battery life is often disappointing. Here are some things you can do to improve your laptop's longevity when you don't have a connection to AC power. Adjust Power Management Settings The Power Management Settings allow you to control when the computer sleeps or hibernates, and how the display behaves. Focus on the "on battery power" settings. If your laptop doesn't behave when hibernating, use the "sleep" or "suspend" setting when closing the lid and when the computer is idle. Usually a laptop's biggest battery usage is in powering the LCD screen.

The brighter the screen, the more power is consumed. Lowest Price On FiestawareI found that reducing screen brightness from 100% to 30% provided enough illumination to see the screen comfortably except outdoors, and dramatically improved battery life. Chocolate Lab Puppies For Sale In Asheville NcIf you can find a setting the allows you to easily read the screen but no brighter, then you'll extend you on-battery time for sure.Sony Vaio Laptop Hinge Repair Turn off what you don't use Don't use a Bluetooth mouse, keyboard or headphones? Turn off your bluetooth adapter in system settings control panel. It uses power searching for bluetooth devices. Turn off similar settings for other devices you never or rarely use.

I was surprised that switching to Ubuntu MATE provided a 40% increase in battery life. It wasn't the MATE desktop environment or the Linux distribution per se that provided the improvement. It was TLP, an advanced power management utility for Linux. According Ubuntu MATE's creator, Martin Wimpress, the distribution comes pre-installed and pre-configured with the TLP command line utility. TLP optimizes power settings automatically on startup and every time you change the power source. If your distribution doesn't install it by default, look in your software repositories for TLP. It'll most likely be there. Get a new battery Although today's battery technology is vastly superior to that of just a few years ago, batteries have a finite lifetime. They don't develop a "memory" when you "top them up" like they used to, but they do have a limited number of full charge cycles they can handle before they expire. If your laptop's battery will no longer hold a charge, maybe it's time to replace it.

Hopefully your model allows you to do that. If not, you may be tethered to AC power until you can replace your computer. Theme music for the Going Linux podcast is generously provided by Mark Blasco. by Larry Bushey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.One of the most important characteristics of a good Linux machine especially with laptops is power management in terms of prolonging battery life. Linux has utilities that can help you to monitor and keep track of your battery performance, though many of us still face problems in getting the right power settings to manage power consumption and improve battery life. In this article we are going to look at a Linux utility called PowerTOP that helps you to get the appropriate system settings to manage power on your Linux machine. PowerTOP is a terminal-based diagnosis tool developed by Intel that helps you to monitor power usage by programs running on a Linux system when it is not plugged on to a power source.

An important feature of PowerTOP is that it provides an interactive mode which allows a user to experiment with different power management settings. PowerTOP requires the following components: PowerTOP can be easily available to install from system default repositories by using your respective package manager. Important: Please note that installing powertop from the default system repositories, will get you a older version. If you’re looking to install most recent version (i.e. v2.7 released on 24 Nov, 2014) of powertop, you have to build it and install it from source, for this you must have following dependencies install on the system. After installing all the above required packages, now it’s time to download most latest version of PowerTop and install it as suggested: To use this tool, one needs root privileges because all the information required by powertop to measure power usage by applications is gathered directly from the system hardware. Try to use it with laptop battery power to see the effects on the system.

It shows the total power usage by the system and by the individual components of the system listed in different categories: devices, processes, system timer, kernel works and interrupts. To set all the tunabale options to the best settings without the interactive mode, use the --auto-tune option. To run it in calibration mode, use the --calibrate option. If you run powertop on laptop battery, it tracks power consumption as well as processes running on the system and after getting enough power measurements, it reports power estimates. You can then use this option to get more appropriate estimates when using this option, to implement a calibration cycle through different display levels and workloads. To run it in debug mode, use the --debug option. You can also generate a report for data analysis by using the --csv=filename. The report generated is called a CSV report and when you do not spell out a file name, a default name powertop.csv is used. To generate a html report file, use the --html=filename option.

You can specify for how long in seconds a report can be generated by using the --time=seconds. You can specify a workload file to execute as part of the calibration before generating a report by using the --workload=workload_filename. To show help messages use the --help option or view the manpage. To specify the number of times a test should be run by using the --iteration option. If you run powertop without any of the above options, it starts in an interactive mode as shown in the output below. This display screen allows you to view a list of the system components that are either sending wake-ups to the CPU most frequently or are using the most power on the system. It displays various information about processor C-states. This screen displays the frequency of wake-ups to the CPU. It provides information similar to the Overview display screen but only for devices. It provides suggestions for optimizing your system for good power consumption.

As you can see from the output above, there are different display screens available and to switch between them, you can use Tab and Shift+Tab keys. Exit powertop by pressing the Esc key as listed at the bottom of the screen. It displays the number times your system wakes up each second, when you view the device stats display screen, it shows statistics of power usage by different hardware components and drivers. To maximize battery power, you have to minimize system wake-ups. And to do this, you can use the Tunables display screen. “Bad” identifies a setting that is not saving power, but may be good for the performance of your system. Then “Good” identifies a setting that is saving power. Hit [Enter] key on any tunable to switch it to the other setting. The example below shows output when using the --calibrate option. After the calibration cycles, powertop will show the overview screen with a summary of operations as below. The next example shows generating a CSV report for twenty seconds.

Now let’s view the CSV report using cat command. You can generate a html report as follows, the html file extension is added automatically to the filename. The sample html report file as viewed from a browser. This tool also has a daemon service that helps to automatically set all tunables to “Good” for optimal power saving, and you can use it as follows: To make the daemon service start at boot time, run the following command: You need to take caution when using daemon service because certain tunables pose a risk of data loss or weird system hardware behavior. This is evident with the “VM writeback timeout” settings that affects the time your system waits before writing any changes of data to the actual disk. When the system loses all it power, then you risk losing all changes made on data for the last few seconds. Therefore you have to choose between saving power and securing your data. Try to use this tool for some period of time and observe the performance of your battery.