

Expect Longer Battery Life with Ubuntu Linux 12.04 - nickolai
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/246432/expect_longer_battery_life_with_ubuntu_linux_1204_precise_pangolin.html

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motter
Anecdotally, I appear to get better battery life with Windows (and some
vendor-specific additions) than with Ubuntu on my laptop.

It's great to hear this is an active area of development, as it's probably the
biggest remaining factor in me choosing host OS.

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pavelkaroukin
It is quite true. A lot of hardware today require drivers (ah.. I remember
days I hated software modems 'cos without drivers these were useless, and now
this is normal). And most drivers are proprietary. And on top of it - often
hardware is being customized by OEMs requiring even more spcialized drivers..
And of course, nobody bother with doing drivers for Linux...

This is a case with my new Dell Precision M6600. It have on-chip GPU and
discrete GPU. I still trying to find a way to switch to integrated GPU. And
this one of the areas Ubuntu 12.04 should fix (well. To be exact, not Ubuntu,
but kernel included into this distribution).

Just from witching from external GPU to internal GPU I expect to bump battery-
time to ~6 hours from current 3 hours.

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mike-cardwell
Excellent. I'm still on 11.04 on the laptop atm. I installed 11.10 on the HTPC
and it didn't seem to provide anything new that was especially useful. I think
I'll give 12.04 a try in July after it's had a few months to bed in.

~~~
Random_Person
I blindly upgraded to 11.10 Xubuntu on both the latptop and work machine and
have regretted it ever since. Not only did it not offer any new value, it have
had stability issues that I never saw with 11.04.

~~~
m_for_monkey
The problem is that you upgraded. I did the same and got the same result but a
clean Xubuntu install works like a charm.

~~~
Random_Person
Possibly. I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 without a hitch and was hopeful that
they hat sorted the standard upgrade issues. I personalize my installs so much
that I really hate fresh loads, but I'll be doing only that in the future.
Maybe I'll stick to long-term releases only.

~~~
m_for_monkey
I reply to that comment after two days, I don't know if you or anyone else
will read this.

My rules of upgrade:

1\. Keep your home folder in a separate partition.

2\. Backup at least your system partition before upgrading using Remastersys
[1]. It creates a live CD/DVD from your custom Debian/Ubuntu system.

3\. If the upgrade fails, restore the old system or install the new version
and copy/adapt your config files from the backup.

[1] <http://remastersys.sourceforge.net/>

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macco
Good to hear that canonical is addressing this.

I had complaining customers on my SatchBook. Battery life got worse with every
release recently.

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ars
Why is this a canonical thing?

It seem to me to be a kernel thing.

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macco
That's right, but it's not only the kernel that uses power.

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pyre
All of the solutions/fixes talked about in the article seem to be at the
kernel level. Do you have evidence that Canonical is working on power savings
with user-land processes?

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jhancock
I'm using an old Thinkpad x41 running Lubuntu 11.10. It has a new third party
battery, 6 cell...the batt is now more than 1 year old now. I get well over 3
hours on a full charge. I'm pleased with this. Would be happy to put a future
ubuntu on a future MacBook Air and get 6 hours of battery. That's about the
only thing that might pry this x41 out of my hands.

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fader
I've been playing with the 3.2 kernels from the Ubuntu kernel PPA and there's
a dramatic increase in battery life for me. I go from ~3.5 hours to ~6-6.5 on
the same hardware. (It's a bit unstable though... I've had a couple of crash
issues. But it's still a development kernel so that's to be expected.)

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realschool
Hopefully this is true, I bought a Macbook because my older laptop with a new
battery and Ubuntu lasted for less then an hour fully charged. There didn't
seem to be any native power-management tools and all the solutions seemed
overly complicated and hacky.

