July 20th, 2008 . .
Categorized under: openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE 11.0

Improve laptop battery life in openSUSE

Power management is one of the big things Linux gets criticized for and although we might not be perfect, there are things we can do to improve our battery life.

The best thing you need to do to improve the battery life of your laptop is to analyze/profile your power consumption to figure out what applications are draining your battery. To do this you use an application developed by Intel called Powertop.

# zypper in powertop
# powertop

After you run power top, it’ll analyze your system for a few seconds and not only alert you of the major applications and/or hardware that are draining your battery, but also solutions on fixing these issues. Here is a screenshot of it in action:
Powertop Screenshot
When you have powertop apply a suggested change it does not modify your system settings, it will only persist the change(s) as long as powertop is open, as soon as you close it the changes will revert back to system defaults.

Some cool tips for working with powertop can be find at http://www.lesswatts.org/tips/

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Comments

  1. Really tks that was a nice tip… keep doing the good job ..

    I still have a “ndiswrapper, yenta” draining my battery, but i’ll find a solution soon.. i hope.lol

    tks


    eros
    July 23rd, 2008

  2. This is an interesting topic. Can you provide some details about changing the CPU governor?

    I found out about this when reading various tips on power saving; and I am able to change the governor from the command line. But is there a way to change it with a graphical tool? I am preparing a laptop computer for a non-tech person, and if there is easy way to change the governor – they will not be able to do this without my assistance.

    Also, how to make the changes suggested by powertop persistent? (besides actually doing what they suggest in the tip by altering those files/settings).

    This is a good article, but I hope that there will be a followup with more tips.


    Alex Railean
    July 25th, 2008

  3. does this work with amd processors too?


    Prateek
    August 18th, 2008

  4. [...] do disable it to save battery life time. I read a good howto on improving battery life in opensuse openSUSE Tutorials maybe you find there some hints and tips how to decrease disk activity (especially powertop might [...]


    Too much HDD activity - openSUSE Forums
    September 17th, 2008

  5. Just heard about Linux power management hope this is more sophisticated than windows one


    michel
    January 11th, 2009

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