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Showing posts from December, 2010

Prolonging the battery life on your laptop/netbook running Ubuntu

mdz pointed me to Idea 24782 over at Ubuntu Brainstorm that urges the Ubuntu community to increase focus on making Ubuntu run longer on devices with batteries. I support the idea wholeheartedly. Since the advent of laptops and netbooks, users have wanted to stretch the battery to last that extra 15 minutes it'll require for them to finish up their email or their documents. In fact, the most popular idea ever on Brainstorm is about fixing suspend and hibernate. Unfortunately, it ended up becoming a whirlpool of several different ideas, albeit with a common theme - making the battery last longer . There are several things that can be done to make the battery on a mobile device last longer - some under user control, others under OS/firmware control and some others dependent on HW capabilities. I am going to attempt to summarize the various use profiles and what Ubuntu does (or can do) to prolong battery life in those profiles. Power management, when done right, should not requi