Tweaks to improve battery life

Has anyone succeeded in improving the battery life through tweaks to the software, kernel or power saving options?

List the changes you've made providing enough detail for others to reproduce, the distro and what improvements it made to the battery life.

Maybe a moderator could sticky this thread and prevent it wandering off-topic?

 

With all the tips I found at this forum I managed to get it down to (on xubutu install)
7.3-7.7W idle.
8.5 When playing music (and no wifi)
8.7 When idle but with wifi active and associated.

This includes the following actions:
* Install latest bios. (don't know if it helped)
* Disable WOL on the ethernet card.
* Keep usb in suspend mode. (see the install ubuntu section)
* Run the jmb38x_d3e.sh script from the stock software thing.
* change the writeback timeout
* enable laptop mode
* enable power save on the audio card.

Things that can be better:
* The irq scheduling, causing the cpu to wake up ~44 times/sec. irqbalance did not help.

 

Does no-one have any tweaks for the default linpus install?

 

Configuring so that the CPU speed is not increased for nice'd processes. (Ie. keep the CPU speed at 800 for background/low priority processes but still allow it to increase on demand for others.) This may provide minimal benefit and could cause some things to respond slower.

Open a terminal and switch to the root user. Example:

Code:

su -

Change to the '/etc/sysconfig' directory.

Code:

cd /etc/sysconfig

Edit the 'cpuspeed' file using your preferred text edit. Example:

Code:

vi cpuspeed

( Some basic vi: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/vi.html )

Find the line:

Code:

IGNORE_NICE=0

Change to:

Code:

IGNORE_NICE=1

Save the file and restart the cpuspeed service. If you don't know how to restart a service in your distro of choice, just reboot after exiting the terminal. I got into using this setting on my desktop computer where I run the boinc client for the World Community Grid projects. I've done it on my AA1 w/ Fedora too and I'm happy with the responsiveness.

 

Hi,
i tried to do what you´ve done, but on my AAO with linux linpus there´s no such a file cpuspeed. Any idea?

 

I'm using Fedora 8 and didn't think to check if the AA1's Linpus had this file.