I’m trying to improve the power management under battery power and one of the methods is to use laptop-mode. I’m a bit confused now as I found a reference in the Thinkwiki- Laptop-mode that says not to use laptop-mode with Suse.
NOTE!
The use of Laptop-mode and laptop-mode-tools is not recommended in SuSE Linux. The supplied powersaved already takes care of everything regarding power saving
Is this valid for 11.1? I noticed that laptop-mode was installed automatically with the installation. So why would it be installed if it’s not recommended for use with suse? Anyone know anything about using powersaved?
My experience:
If it says that it isn’t recommended then do not do it, here is the reason:The supplied powersaved already takes care of everything regarding power saving.
Anyway I’ve tried one time to hack something on my laptop around powersaving and hard-disk features. And on the next reboot there were no reboot - there was no disk activity, nothing.
The worst 1 hours of my life - The whole laptop was blocked even the power-button. Doesn’t worth it to hack these settings - unless if your are a laptop-hardware guru or you have a spare laptop.
Is there any way to configure poerseaved or change some of the parameters in it? I can’t seem to find too much documented about it.
If laptop-mode is not recommended then why is it included with opensuse?
In KDE you can configure the powersaving profiles in Personal Settings > Advanced > Power Management (this uses powerdevil as backend). In Gnome use the gnome-powersave applet.
The laptop-mode is one part of application it can’t be included or not (by openSUSE).
[QUOTE=ram88;1993928]In Gnome use the gnome-powersave applet.
QUOTE]
Yes I used that applet but it’s too limited. For instance you can’t set a time for the monitor to blank in less than 11 minutes. You cannot set how much you want the display brightness to reduce by when switching to battery etc. I don’t know if this is only particuklar to the gnome applet or if the KDE one is the same as I haven’t tried KDE yet.
I can’t understand all this fascinating over ‘Powersave’ - I guess it must depend on your circumstances - But even when I’m traveling I’m never away from an outlet for long. I’ll get a good 3hrs even on Performance from my battery. Planes, Trains and Automobiles all have power outlets, so unless you travel by Ox and Cart and live in some remote backwood…
Be careful running powersave for kde3 in kde4. When I had both kde3 and kde4 installed last year, I ended up deleting all powersave packages because it bugging powerdevil.
It was even more confussing as I recall because originally powerdevil was an application itself, but later it became integrated into the kde4 base.
I can’t understand all this fascinating over ‘Powersave’ - I guess it must depend on your circumstances - But even when I’m traveling I’m never away from an outlet for long. I’ll get a good 3hrs even on Performance from my battery. Planes, Trains and Automobiles all have power outlets, so unless you travel by Ox and Cart and live in some remote backwood…
/QUOTE]
Unfortunately the airlines I fly on (I’m based in Europe) do not have power sockets in economy class so I often have to have at least 6 hours battery power for my most frequent routes and transatlantic, will require more.
At the moment I barely get 60minutes from my normal battery in Suse where I would get closer to 2 hours in XP. I haven’t really tried tweaking the power management in suse under KDE yet though so it should improve.
These powersaving applications (personal experience) have a lot of bugs. On this summer I’m going to buy a new battery to my laptop - I’m worrying about the lifetime…buying a new battery in every year doesn’t worth it…
XP is handling the same battery much better and the lifetime is longer - OK it depends on various factors not just on the power saving software, example: my video card - because the driver - is overheated under suse, so it makes the battery even hotter == the lifetime is descending.
ps.: I’m using the Glassified theme, caf4926 is using the default Oxygen theme (I guess).
To make the screen turn off in less than 11 min you need to change the timeout in the screen saver from 10 min to a lower value. After you reduce the screen saver time you can reduce the time till screen off.
