Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

ucal · 2010-04-30 00:56:29

Hi all. Battery life with KDE hasn't been what I feel it should be, but I still like the feature set, so I'd like to create a different profile that loads with a different window manager, and other tweaks, to preserve battery life during class.

What I need: Window Manager, Web Browser, Terminal, Power Manager, Text or Document Editor.

Window Manager:
This I might have the most trouble with. As far as I can tell, all I have to do is edit the ~/.xinitrc of the new profile with the manager of choice, but as it stands now, KDE autostarts without me logging into the profile I have it set to start in. If I add a new user profile and set it to start a new environment, will this behavior change?

Right now I'm looking into OpenBox.

Web Browser: I would prefer flash and javascript support (can't make it through the bull**** classes without youtube >_>), but I'm willing to sacrifice those to save battery life. Any suggestions?

Looking at the standard 3 (chrome, firefox, opera) as well as things like vimprobable.

Terminal: Pretty self explanatory. Just in case, and as a likely app launcher. I'm sure I can find a graphical front end.

Power Management: Really only to test how much battery life I'd have left. No idea here.

Document or Text Editor: I need to take notes somehow, and a lightweight program for it would be much appreciated. I doubt open office would be the best choice for this. Don't know what I'm looking at right now.

So, what programs would you recommend in order to maximize battery life, and will all this effort make a difference?

Also, lately my clock has been completely off a lot. I installed NTP, have it running (the daemon, as well as the ntdate daemon are in /etc/rc.conf) but the clock is still off after shutdown and reboot. It's getting tiresome having to manually set it back.

eirik · 2010-04-30 01:38:36

>If I add a new user profile and set it to start a new environment, will this behavior change?
Sure.

>Web Browser
Midori is pretty lightweight.

>Terminal
I like Guake.

>Document or Text Editor
AbiWord is a lightweight word processor, there's also gvim and the likes for pure text editing.

You should enable CPU frequency scaling and make sure to turn down screen brightness, those're usually the main offenders.

Last edited by eirik (2010-04-30 01:39:02)

schen · 2010-04-30 02:36:48

For window managers, openbox is a good one, but it will take some time to configure to what you want. However, once you configure it, you might love it so much that you use it instead of KDE.

>Web Browser
I'm not sure this really matters. A lightweight one that you might use is surf. However, I use chromium.

>Terminal
Urxvt. Like Openbox, it takes some time to configure, but once you get it the way you want, you will never switch back. There are a plethora of features in urxvt, like transparency, Unicode support, and most importantly, lightweightness.

>Text Editor
Just use a commandline text editor. I use nano, but don't laugh at me for not using emacs/vi/vim/whatever. I'm just too lazy to learn all the commands.

Also, follow this wiki article for configuring your laptop to be more powersaving.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop

Last edited by schen (2010-04-30 02:41:29)

jasonwryan · 2010-04-30 02:48:26

ucal wrote:

What I need: Window Manager, Web Browser, Terminal, Power Manager, Text or Document Editor.

WM: Openbox -or if you want to go really lightweight, one of the minimal tilers...
Browser: uzbl
Terminal: urxvtd/c
Power manager: laptop-mode-tools, pm-utils, cpufrequtils, acpid & conky
Editor: vim

You can find a lot morwe detail in the Light & Fast thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=88515

stqn · 2010-05-01 00:17:11

I may be wrong, but I don't think changing your window manager, terminal or text editor is going to change much your laptop's power consumption unless they are really badly programmed (never used KDE so I don't know). The web browser might be another story if you don't spend much time actually reading web pages but click and scroll a lot and/or visit "heavy" web pages...

What I'd look at:
- making sure cpufreq is working, maybe setting it to "conservative" rather than "ondemand" and/or restricting it to lower frequencies (but I'm not sure if that will reduce power usage)
- undervolting the cpu, if possible (this did cut the power consumption of my Pentium-M in half)
- powering unused stuff off (wifi, bluetooth, whatever)
- of course disabling any "candy" effect of the WM (shadow, transparency, etc.)

Edit: forgot something:
- install AdBlock, FlashBlock and ImgLikeOpera, and disable custom colors in Firefox so that background images are not loaded. Maybe disable javascript too. (FlashBlock won't prevent you from watching youtube, you just have to click one more time on the videos.)

Last edited by stqn (2010-05-01 00:23:07)

briest · 2010-05-01 09:52:25

ucal wrote:

Web Browser: I would prefer flash and javascript support (can't make it through the bull**** classes without youtube >_>), but I'm willing to sacrifice those to save battery life. Any suggestions?

NoScript extension for Firefox will allow you to toggle javascript/flash/java/... on page or domain basis.

ucal · 2010-05-01 18:24:47

KDE seems like it's loading a lot of extra services that I don't need, which I worry might be causing power drain. Regardless, I don't really need those services, so installing it in the first place wasn't arch wayey >_>. Openbox seems more in line with that philosophy.

Anyways, i'll look into undervolting the CPU. One thing I've noticed is that my laptop runs a lot hotter than it does in windows, even though the cpu is set to 550 mhz.

Also, ever since getting rid of kdm ifor slim, I've lost the ability to do things such as set the clock, reboot, and poweroff graphically. I have to do it all in the terminal. Anyway to fix this short of doing kdm again?

Also, any ideas on why my system clock is running fast, and ntp is failing to set it correctly?

EDIT: looking into what kind of processor my computer shipped with, I'm pretty sure it was an AMD Turion x2. I don't think i can undervolt this, as it isn't of the K8 series.

EDIT EDIT: Another problem i've just discovered. I can't set the cpufreq governors on both of my processors. the command only sets the governor for one, the other is set to performance constantly. I'm editing the demon to automatically start in powersave mode (before all lines were commented out), hopefully that will be a temp fix for this issue.

Last edited by ucal (2010-05-01 19:37:13)

Caedmon · 2010-05-01 20:16:41

You need to choose the CPU number manualy with `cpufreq-set -c <number> [options]' the default is `-c 0'

toad · 2010-05-02 17:25:49

kde does not drain resources - stuff like virtuoso is automatically suspended as soon as you run on battery. Install powertop and follow stqn's advice for better battery life and configure your kde power management properly.

ucal · 2010-05-03 17:14:22

Thanks for that cpufreq command notation. I think that will help me get back up to windows levels of battery life. I would still like to improve it however, so I'm looking into fanspeed control. Is that too risky? I've looked into it, and I've gotten up to installing the driver for the temperature modules (which incidently, given the name of that driver, leads me to believe that undervolting my cpu isn't going to happen), but ultimately, I have no idea which fan to select in the config file (the names aren't very descriptive >_>) so I'm stuck on that. Anybody got any tips on figuring out which fan is mine?

Arch Linux

#1 2010-04-30 00:56:29

Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#2 2010-04-30 01:38:36

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#3 2010-04-30 02:36:48

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#4 2010-04-30 02:48:26

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#5 2010-05-01 00:17:11

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#6 2010-05-01 09:52:25

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#7 2010-05-01 18:24:47

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#8 2010-05-01 20:16:41

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#9 2010-05-02 17:25:49

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

#10 2010-05-03 17:14:22

Re: Making a battery preserving profile (and some mild clock issues)

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