I’m using Compaq Presario CQ40-115AU notebook,with AMD Turion 64x2 2.0GHz processor,AMD 780G board,integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphic card,2GB Kingston DDR2 667MHz RAM.
My 6 cell battery last for 2 hours with Ubuntu 9.04 amd64,but with openSUSE 11.2 KDE4.3.1 RC1 ,it reduce to 1 hour 20 minutes.
Anyone know what’s the reason? 
marcoslai wrote:
> I’m using Compaq Presario CQ40-115AU notebook,with AMD Turion 64x2
> 2.0GHz processor,AMD 780G board,integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphic
> card,2GB Kingston DDR2 667MHz RAM.
>
> My 6 cell battery last for 2 hours with Ubuntu 9.04
> amd64,but with openSUSE 11.2 KDE4.3.1 RC1 ,it reduce to 1 hour 20
> minutes.
> Anyone know what’s the reason?
>
>
This is quite an interesting subject, battery life.
I just bought an uber big battery to my EeePC 900 and now I get 8 hours
of video over the network via UMTS. The original gave like two hours.
Some things that spend/save batteries are (I think):
Screen brightness
The length of time before screensaver starts
(Screensaver should just blank the screen)
If rotating hard disks present, their sleep times/intervals.
(EeePC has ssd drive)
Proc throttling
Fan
Else?
Vahis
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5:56pm up 1 day 22:57, 10 users, load average: 0.17, 0.27, 0.24
Unfortunately I also have seen the same problem with opensuse 11.2 on AMD laptop.
Prior to upgrading, while using Opensuse 11.1 I would get near 2 hrs of battery life, however after upgrading I am getting barely 1 hr.
I thought it might be the fancy gnome / compiz effect so I installed my favourite enlightenment (thx dmtry) however it had no effect, battery life is still poor.
Seems all good things aren’t meant to last.
When on th desktop, press ctrl-escape and watch the task list.
I did a comparison about 8 months ago between KDE3 and KDE4 running under openSUSE 11.1 on my HP laptop. Not strictly “scientific”, but based on “everyday use”.
I found that KDE4 reduced my battery times.
The culprit is having too many plasmoids on your desktop, especially ones that access the net often.
Remove all your plasmoids and then look at the CPU usage again, you should see it drop to about 1% for xorg and kwin, and plasma-desktop shouldn’t even rate.
With lots of plasmoids, you could be looking at upto 20% CPU wastage, and I found the Google Gadgets to be the worst offenders!
Of course if anything else is wasting CPU time in that ctrl-escape list, then you need to look at that too.
Thanks for the response.
However I don’t use plasmoids, google-gadgets etc.
My current setup is the same as I had before upgrading to 11.2, same applications, same plugins, same tools etc.
There are no cpu hogging processes in the top list and the usage is as it was in 11.1
The only difference is that my battery life has halved.
Thx
vatsers wrote:
>
> Thanks for the response.
> However I don’t use plasmoids, google-gadgets etc.
> My current setup is the same as I had before upgrading to 11.2, same
> applications, same plugins, same tools etc.
> There are no cpu hogging processes in the top list and the usage is as
> it was in 11.1
>
> The only difference is that my battery life has halved.
I found one surprising thing that sucked the battery dry as you describe.
The wife wanted a pretty screen saver instead of the static or blank screen
I normally use. Some of the ones she want to try would actually use MORE
power than a running desktop! Sneaky. After running out of battery a few
times, she has come to see the light but this was one where she had to see
for herself instead of just being told.
–
Will Honea
Could it be that it’s not the battery life as such but the way it’s reported by the panel plasmoid? I get 3 hours under Vista out of the same laptop compared to 2 hours with openSUSE. Now the default power management setting is to shut down (or suspend) the laptop when Powerdevil THINKS it’s down to whatever the percentage remaining is. Haven’t tested this yet, but I will tomorrow: set it to “do nothing” and see how long it runs after allegedly being down to “0%”.
Previous experience tells me that it’s often only the calibration of whatever reports battery status. I’ve had laptops run under active usage for up to 45 minutes under Linux with “0%” reported. Doing that once or twice might recalibrate things, and give more realistic percentage figures.
That’s exactly what I was thinking @gminnerup, the only true way to find out is to time it till it dies under both 11.1 and 11.2.
Battery usage is one of the issues linux seems not that good with, linux uses devices differently then windows and with most devices made mainly for windows its hard to linux to work with said devices.
2 hours is fair enough if you ask me though, I have a power cord.
Thanks for reading.
However it appears to be a kernel bug, so I will have to wait for updated kernel, or maybe compile from source…
Bug 14424 – Enabled SMP causes hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer) wakeups
vatsers
I have 11.2 and Windows dual booted on my older laptop and the percentages battery life shown are very similar but both shut down before 0%.
When I had 11.1 dual booted, it always seemed to have a little bit more latitude than Windows and didn’t insist on shutting down if you carried on after the warning. Windows just decided to shut down and that was that.
Hello. I’m also experiencing a far lower battery life (a little more than 50%) since i moved from ubuntu 9.10 to opensuse 11.2.
I have an Asus laptop with core2 duo T7700.
I no longer use Ubuntu at all but I do find that on my Toshiba Satellite Pro Windows 7 gives me at least 30% more time than openSUSE KDE4. I used to think it was a question of calibrating the battery monitor but no. It literally dies much more quickly than Windows…
Doesn’t give me sleepless nights because this is a big laptop usually used near a power supply anyway but it’s puzzling.
First, about not having plasmoids/widgets: Everything you see on your KDE4 desktop is a plasmoid/widget; the panel, the pager, the system tray, everything.
On a couple of recent occasions I met decline in battery life after switching to 11.2; then somebody running 11.1 complained about battery life after upgrading his KDE4 from 4.0.1 to 4.3.3, complaining that “something felt wrong”. So I did some amateur testing.
Im most cases I found that plasma was using over 10% of CPU usage (in one even 22% at constant rate). Removing the plasma config files from ~/.kde4/share/config improved things quite a lot.
In one occasion changing kernel-desktop to kernel-default improved things significantly. No idea why.
Then this: the battery of my old laptop ran Vista for a bit more than an hour, XP for over 2 hours, 11.1 and 11.2 2.5 hours from standard HDD, multiply by about 1.4 to get times using SSD.
I didn’t see it mentioned here, but if you want to investigate and identify what is consuming your battery, install powertop, run it in the console and watch it for a while. It also offers you suggestions on how to reduce power consumption.
I get at least the same battery life from 11.2 as I did from 11.1 on my Linux only laptop; I got no difference between Linux 11.1 and Windows on my dual-boot laptop.