Hello wonderful opensuse community.
I have recently installed Opensuse 13.2 KDE on my Asus 1005ha laptop and I have to say it is remarkable. It’s fast, effecient and packed with everything I could ever need for daily use (although flash player is a bit laggy compared to fedora and debian based distros). However when I first installed opensuse I had one major problem - battery life.
Battery life isn’t configured on opensuse out of the box… In fact when I first installed it on my netbook, the battery was draining so quickly that uninstalled it for other distros…I was getting less than 2 hours on browsing and writing…and way less whenever I was watching videos…and I have a 9 cell 7200mah battery that was rated to get 12hours on windows 7.
Eventually I came back to opensuse after attaining more knowledge on which programs manage power consumption. And after I installed these programs and tweaked them, my 7200mah 9 cell battery(it’s a big old battery that’s now 3 years old) now gets its 12hours on idle, 4 hours on video player or flash player, 6+ hours on heavy usage with email, youtube periodically, browsing, writing, music, etc, and 8+ with just standard light usage. It’s lasts me throughout the whole day and then some for the next day.
Here are the programs you’re going to need to install (and some may alread be installed):
*acpid
*pm-utils
*laptop mode tools
*tuned
*tuned utils (im not sure if this is need, but i installed it anyway).
*powertop.
for pm-utils I enabled using:
sudo pm-powersave true
then I linked pm-utils to laptop mode tools (not sure if it does anything)
sudo touch /etc/pm/sleep.d/10-laptop-mode-tools
sudo chmod a+x /etc/pm/sleep.d/10-laptop-mode-tools
sudo gedit /etc/pm/sleep.d/10-laptop-mode-tools (or whatever text editor you desire(i use gedit or nano))
then input:
*case $1 in
hibernate)
/etc/init.d/laptop-mode stop
;;
suspend)
/etc/init.d/laptop-mode stop
;;
thaw)
/etc/init.d/laptop-mode start
;;
resume)
/etc/init.d/laptop-mode start
;;
)
echo Something is not right.
;;
esac
and save.
Then for tuned, you must choose a profile that best suits you.
Input:
**sudo tuned-adm list
**
choose a profile(i chose powersave)
sudo tuned-adm profile powersave
if the terminal says that tuned stopped working or that you cant communicate then type:
***chkconfig tuned on
******service tuned start
*** And afterwards I then input:
**sudo systemctl enable **tuned.service
**sudo **systemctl start tuned.service
ANd afterwards you can check your powertop and see where you stand. There is no need to use powertop --calibrate once you have laptop mode tools installed. It seems that tuned makes the biggest difference considering the first time i had opensuse installed I had installed laptop mode tools, pm-utils and acpid, but not tuned…and it was just recently in this installation that tuned was installed configured that I saw some serious powersavings. With wifi on, and on idle I consume about 6.18W…and without wifi I consume just under 5.56W. It’s simply great to have a laptop that I dont have to worry about charging. I take it with me everywhere: the park, friend’s houses, out to coffee, and on a single charge I get through the day…mind you my battery is huge but, the powersavings I get now rather than before is remarkable.
Here are the links I pieced together this information in case anyone was interested.
tuned:
https://fedorahosted.org/tuned/
http://blog.hacka.net/#post43
pmutils and laptop mode tools:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PowerManagement/ReducedPower
With these configured I’m sure you’re battery will last a bit longer!
Take care!