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Saturday, April 28, 2012

Power Saving Tips on Ubuntu

If you are running 11.10 and suffering from excessive power consumption on your laptop/netbook, I insist upgradation to 12.04 immediately. In the latest 12.04 LTS release, the kernel bug relating to the excess power consumption has been fixed.

On 11.10, my laptop consumed a whooping 31 to 33 W of power. On 12.04, it has fallen down to 24 W. Further more, I've installed these three utilities which seem to have reduced the power consumption from 24 W to 16 W, which is pretty cool.


1) From Ubuntu software center, search for laptop-mode-tools and install it.


2) Install powertop which helps you assess the power consumption details and configure some of the processes. (sudo powertop on terminal to run it after installation)


3) Install jupiter, a tiny applet that runs on startup, a very useful utility that lets you set the mode to power consumption and also lets you configure the bluetooth and wireless options which typically consume a lot of power.


Installation of jupiter :
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/jupiter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jupiter
sudo apt-get install jupiter-support-eee


4) If you are on a hybrid-graphics laptop, you can turn off your graphic card. In my case, this worked like a charm. 

echo OFF | sudo tee /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch 


However, the above command is not persistent and needs to run on every startup. 


Standard tips like keeping the brightness low, turning off wireless/bluetooth when not needed would also help.
I have abandoned using Ubuntu 11.10 from the past 3 to 4 months because of its excessive power consumption on my Dell Inspiron. Thanks to Precise Pangolin and these three utilities, I am back on Ubuntu now. :)


Hope this helps some of you battling with power consumption issues on laptops and netbooks running Ubuntu.

2 comments:

Murpholinox Peligro said...

bought a new battery from sony for my lap
at first the battery time was at 2 hours 30 minutes
now 3 hours 50 minutes
thanks

Anonymous said...

while typing
sudo apt-get install jupiter
shows package not available

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