Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

rboone81 · 2013-12-22 18:26:32

Hi, archers- first post.

First, some background: I've been running Linux exclusively for six years, but only Ubuntu, so that will give you some idea as to my working knowledge. I installed Arch a couple of months ago, so I've learned more in the past two months than in the previous six years. All that is to say, I'm definitely not a noob, but much of my knowledge, especially when it comes to under-the-hood stuff, is superficial.

Onto the problem: everything related to my Arch experience so far is wonderful, with the exception of battery life, which is absolutely horrendous. I'm running an Acer Aspire S3-391 with a hybrid drive (Arch is installed only on the HDD; I didn't touch the SSD). Advertised battery life is ~6 hours. I got around four and a half in Windows, just under four in Ubuntu, and I'm barely getting an hour in Arch. I've gone through the powersaving wiki and implemented all of the methods there. Some had a slight effect, some actually made it worse (like USB autosuspend and disabling Wake-on-LAN), so I undid those two. I've installed TLP, and implemented the tips in this thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=134109. I'm running Gnome, but I've installed Openbox as a standalone WM, Cinnamon, and MATE to test the battery time in those to find out if Gnome was the culprit. Results were basically the same in all DEs.

Here is the output from PowerTOP:
overview, device stats, tunables.

I've gotten the discharge rate down to ~6W on boot, before I launch anything. If I run Firefox, it hovers just over 10W; for Chromium (which is what I regularly use), it's over 12W (even with all extensions and plugins disabled and click-to-play enabled). I'm not sure if this is relevant, but if I run

pacman -S chromium-pepper-flash

, pacman tells me it's not installed. Looking at PowerTOP, though, it's obvious it's installed somehow; for the life of me, I don't remember the specific installation process I used.

That's all the relevant information I can think of. Any help, of course, is greatly appreciated; I've heard such wonderful things about the Arch community, so I'm hopeful. Like I said, I love Arch, with this potentially deal-killing exception. Again, please assume I'm comfortable with the command line and editing text files, but that my knowledge of precisely what I'm doing is limited and superficial.

Last edited by rboone81 (2014-01-09 16:37:54)

crt666 · 2013-12-22 22:16:54

Time for a new/better battery?

rboone81 · 2013-12-26 22:41:27

Spent some time on Google+ with this problem, only to find out that my battery is in need of replacement (I hadn't considered that as an option since the laptop is only 5 mos. old). For those that might be able to benefit from that, here is the thread.

On an unrelated note, this is my first post, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to edit the thread title to mark is as solved. Any help?

lucke · 2013-12-26 22:56:07

Edit the first post.

WonderWoofy · 2013-12-26 23:34:24

rboone81 wrote:

...my battery is in need of replacement (I hadn't considered that as an option since the laptop is only 5 mos. old)....

I would definitely try to RMA that battery if it is only 5 months old. There is no reason why one should have a battery degrade that much within the warranty period.

thiagowfx · 2013-12-28 03:31:40

rboone81 wrote:

[...] I'm not sure if this is relevant, but if I run
pacman -S chromium-pepper-flash
, pacman tells me it's not installed. Looking at PowerTOP, though, it's obvious it's installed somehow; for the life of me, I don't remember the specific installation process I used.

chromium-pepper-flash is not on the official repos; it's on the AUR. That's why you can't see it with pacman -S.

If you want to see which packages from the AUR you have installed, use

pacman -Qm

WonderWoofy · 2013-12-28 04:05:45

Also you can search through your local packages with -Qs or the pacsearch script.

rboone81 · 2014-01-09 16:43:29

Not found with -Qm, either. I did find it with -Qs:

local/chromium-pepper-flash-stable 2:11.9.900.152-2 / Google Chrome's Pepper Flash plugin for Chromium (stable version)

Also: thanks, everyone.

Last edited by rboone81 (2014-01-09 16:43:50)

karol · 2014-01-10 21:50:52

Do you have herecura-stable unofficial repo enabled in your pacman.conf?

Arch Linux

#1 2013-12-22 18:26:32

Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

#2 2013-12-22 22:16:54

Re: Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

#3 2013-12-26 22:41:27

Re: Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

#4 2013-12-26 22:56:07

Re: Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

#5 2013-12-26 23:34:24

Re: Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

#6 2013-12-28 03:31:40

Re: Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

#7 2013-12-28 04:05:45

Re: Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

#8 2014-01-09 16:43:29

Re: Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

#9 2014-01-10 21:50:52

Re: Horrible battery life [SOLVED]

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