Battery Life with Mandrake Linux

[ShadowDeveloper]

I recently installed Mandrake 9 on a Compaq 722US laptop. It is a 1.2Ghz laptop with 256MB of RAM, DVD/CDRW combo drive, and a 20GB hard drive. On WinXP Home the battery will last up to 3 hours and averages about 2 hours 45 minutes. With Mandrake and Gnome installed and leaving the laptop set on idle, the battery life is only 45 minutes.

Is KDE any better with power management than Gnome, or would I have to use a different distro other than Mandrake. Keep in mind I am a newbie when it comes to Linux and Mandrake has been the easiest to install on my laptop and desktop. Even easier than Red Hat.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

[Ptrper]

Hi Shadow,

I recently installed/uninstalled MD9 on my Sony VAIO laptop. I was running into the same issue with the battery. I believe in the lower right hand corner, when you unplug the cord, an icon with a battery and meter will pop in. If you click on this icon, you should be able to set the power management for extended battery life through KDE. One other question I have is, have you turned off all unnecessary servers and services that are running in the background?

Hope this helps you out.

Ed

One question I have is: Is anyone working on something like Intel's "SpeedStep" power management for Linux? This would definitley be a cool tool...

[Molecule Man]

Does the notebook use APM or ACPI?

If the latter, you can get better power management, but you will need to recompile the kernel for that support.

[ShadowDeveloper]

Thank you guys for the help. I never thought of installing KDE before to help with my problems on my laptop. I installed it on one of my desktops because I wanted to see what it looked like.

I didn't install too many services on the laptop, but I probably did install a couple of servers without knowing it would cause the battery life problem.

My laptop is an AMD Duron 1.2Ghz. processor and WinXP said it uses ACPI power management when I went into the device manager. Is there anything I could do to get more life out of my battery with Linux?

[mi6]

yes, battery life is better under XP because it is using ACPI to manage its power.

Installing ACPI in the Linux Kernel will help. I have a Presario 2715US and have been struggling with the same problems. I can't get ACPI correctly configure to manage my fan/battery/standby functions.

[ShadowDeveloper]

How do you configure ACPI in Mandrake Linux? Is there a website that could help with this?

[mi6]

I have been ultimately unsuccessful in getting it to work properly. It seems that the ACPI standard isn't, well standard..

This is one of the most informative links I have found Mandrake ACPI (http://axion.physics.ubc.ca/mandrake90-acpi.html)

good luck

scotty

[jlh]

Shadow and mi6, fwiw, I've got a different computer than both of you - an HP ZE1210 - which had similar symptoms under MDK 9. When I recompiled the kernel, I completely turned off APM and turned on most of the ACPI options. Now the computer does not run hot, the fan does not come on much, and the battery laptop daemon works fine. I have not compared battery run times to XP, but I believe they are similar now.

Hope that helps.

[ShadowDeveloper]

What were the exact steps that you took for configuring the ACPI in Mandrake 9? I tried doing that and when I got to the step 'make modules_install', I received errors stating that the drivers in the ATM directory were not found and it couldn't continue. Is that normal?

[jlh]

I'm at work and the directions I followed are at home. I will try to find them and post them. Those directions are in an excellent thread on this board somewhere. I followed them verbatim, turned APM off and most of the ACPI on. I used the xconfig which brings up a screen of check boxes. There were no errors messages when I compiled.

[ShadowDeveloper]

Thank you for doing this. I know I am not the only one trying to figure out ACPI with Mandrake. I did use the 'make xconfig' from one of the help files from this website. XConfig is easy to use.

Thanks again.

[jlh]

I was wrong, this came from another board:

cd /usr/src/linux
make mrproper
make xconfig
in xconfig choose load config file - /boot/config
change the apm / acpi opts
make dep
make clean
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
make install

[Molecule Man]

and do not forget make initrd.

[jlh]

hmmm...

I didn't do the make initrd, my understanding was that the make install does that.

[ShadowDeveloper]

You don't need to 'make initrd'. I compiled the kernel with no problem. I didn't do the 'make mrproper' beforehand. Thank you for your help.

[Molecule Man]

It depends on the particular configuration. If you use anything nonstandard that is required for booting and you did not compile it into the kernel instead of as a module- say reiserfs or scsi, you will be unable to boot. make initrd is a safety precaution.

[jlh]

Thanks, Molecule Man, I learned something.

[pmrphs2002]

I run MDK 9.1, and im just looking to figure out how to get the laptop to gauge battery life:

It realizes its a laptop, but it doesn't tell me how much juice i have left......somebody help??
:D

[Molecule Man]

You will probably need to enable ACPI in your kernel config and recompile. Or upgrade to MDK9.2.