Thinkpads Forum

Hey all,

I salvaged a T400 from my aunt who said it was "getting slow". After opening the lid and finding some missing keys and a whole lot of cat hair, I booted the poor thing into 32-bit Vista with 4 users . (Note: the machine has 4 GB of RAM.) I ordered a T60 keyboard and installed that, replaced the hard drive with a Crucial BX100 256GB SSD and ordered an original 9-cell battery. Now, all that's left to do is choose an OS.

My usage will be schoolwork, so I have no need for the switchable graphics. What I do need is very, very good battery life (8-hour good). Screen brightness will be around 60%, internet will be off.

I'm leaning towards Ubuntu, but the only thing I'm worried about is the battery life. Will Ubuntu give methe kind of battery life I need, or do I need to stick to Windows?

Welcome to the forum!

Don't I know you from somewhere...

NadavCE wrote:Will Ubuntu give methe kind of battery life I need, or do I need to stick to Windows?

Stick with Windows. Period.

ajkula66 wrote:Welcome to the forum!

Don't I know you from somewhere...

NadavCE wrote:Will Ubuntu give methe kind of battery life I need, or do I need to stick to Windows?

Stick with Windows. Period.

Yep, from the notebookcheck forums. I really want to give Ubuntu a shot though. When my battery arrives, I'll test battery life under Windows, and under Ubuntu and post the results in a separate thread (which I will link in this comment once it's up.)

Ubuntu's services and desktop environment makes it one of the most bloated and resource hogging Linux distros. Windows would win in this case for sure. Now, if you go with something lighter, such as Linuxmint with the xfce desktop, that may be a slightly different story.

Of the dozens of Linux flavors I have installed, I don't remember any getting better battery than windows. Linux mint might have got similar runtimes though. Without power management drivers, I got about 70% battery life at most (commonly left out on very 'light' systems, but can be installed manually).

I get 8h of office from my T61 14" with 9c under Ubuntu 14.04. (30% brightness, wireless on) I will be shocked if the T400 can't do that.

As another option, why not try each out and see which one runs longer? If you dual boot, make sure to install windows 7 first.

brchan wrote:As another option, why not try each out and see which one runs longer? If you dual boot, make sure to install windows 7 first.

He already said he was going to do that.

FWIW, I have a new 9-Cell in my T410 with an i5 M520 and the Nvidia chip. I get between 5 and 6 hours whether I am in Windows or Linux. I get about 45 minutes to 1 hour more run time in Windows though. That being said Linux and its ability have long run times on laptops has gotten a lot better over the years. Especially for Thinkpads and Latitudes. I don't have research to back that up, just my experience as pretty in depth sysadmin / geek / IT guy using those 2 platforms for the last 2 decades.

I have tried Linux a few times and I keep coming back to Windows. Unless all you want to do is check your email and the Open Office suite is good enough for school you will find a lot of apps you need are in Windows. I hated the move from XP but now that I am on Windows 7 I think its fine.

I think you will be surprised at the battery life with your SSD installed.

BTW your computer from the cat owner.... did you use a little Frontline on it just in case....

wmgeorge64 wrote:Unless all you want to do is check your email and the Open Office suite is good enough for school you will find a lot of apps you need are in Windows.

I would say that there are many great equivalent apps on linux as on windows, but the best apps (ex. adobe photoshop vs gimp) are probably more on windows. For programming, linux is generally much easier to set up and use.

Thanks for all the replies! I set up a dual boot with elementary Os Freya. Software wise, both OSes suit me- I use Abiword as a Word replacement and Cherrytree as a Onenote replacement (although I much prefer elementary's design and UI). Once my battery arrives, I'll test both Windows and elementary OS and post the results here.

If you go with Linux, install tlp from here: http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-lin ... ement.html

It does a very good job with power management and should give you great battery life. Also, disabling display compositing or any other extra graphical effects will help out as well. Avoiding Ubuntu is a good choice if you want to conserve resources.

On OpenBSD, I have found that light Webkit based web browsers are easier on the battery than Firefox or Chromium. I use Xombrero for just about everything and love it. It may also be true on Linux, though I don't use Linux so I can't test it for you.

Kilkenny wrote: Avoiding Ubuntu is a good choice if you want to conserve resources.

What exactly about Ubuntu is so power-hungry? Is it the Unity desktop?

NadavCE wrote:

Kilkenny wrote: Avoiding Ubuntu is a good choice if you want to conserve resources.

What exactly about Ubuntu is so power-hungry? Is it the Unity desktop?

That's a big part of it. Unity uses a lot of transparency and nice graphical efects, all of which put a larger strain on the system. It's not a night and day difference, but I have found that disabling them or going to a different desktop envrionment or lightweight WM can reduce power consumption.

Ubuntu also includes a lot of daemons to make things easier. It has stuff running in the background searching for updates, etc. This also consumes power and isn't really necessary; just remember to update everyting now and then and you'll be fine.

I'm not saying Ubuntu is a bad distro because it is very good for someone willing to get their feet wet with Linux provided they have powerful enough hardware. But if you want the best possible battery life or performance, it's not the right tool for the job. That said, tlp can make a big difference in battery life even in Ubuntu.

Kilkenny wrote: That's a big part of it. Unity uses a lot of transparency and nice graphical efects, all of which put a larger strain on the system. It's not a night and day difference, but I have found that disabling them or going to a different desktop envrionment or lightweight WM can reduce power consumption.

Ubuntu also includes a lot of daemons to make things easier. It has stuff running in the background searching for updates, etc. This also consumes power and isn't really necessary; just remember to update everyting now and then and you'll be fine.

I'm not saying Ubuntu is a bad distro because it is very good for someone willing to get their feet wet with Linux provided they have powerful enough hardware. But if you want the best possible battery life or performance, it's not the right tool for the job. That said, tlp can make a big difference in battery life even in Ubuntu.

So, by installing elementary OS, (that has almost no preinstalled programs, and a very light DE) disabling "automatically check for updates" and installing TLP I have a good shot at decent battery life?

NadavCE wrote:

Kilkenny wrote: That's a big part of it. Unity uses a lot of transparency and nice graphical efects, all of which put a larger strain on the system. It's not a night and day difference, but I have found that disabling them or going to a different desktop envrionment or lightweight WM can reduce power consumption.

Ubuntu also includes a lot of daemons to make things easier. It has stuff running in the background searching for updates, etc. This also consumes power and isn't really necessary; just remember to update everyting now and then and you'll be fine.

I'm not saying Ubuntu is a bad distro because it is very good for someone willing to get their feet wet with Linux provided they have powerful enough hardware. But if you want the best possible battery life or performance, it's not the right tool for the job. That said, tlp can make a big difference in battery life even in Ubuntu.

So, by installing elementary OS, (that has almost no preinstalled programs, and a very light DE) disabling "automatically check for updates" and installing TLP I have a good shot at decent battery life?

I've never used Elementary, but that sounds good to me.

Also, if your T400 has switchable graphics, using the integrated graphics rather than the ATI will be a big help as well.

Kilkenny wrote: I've never used Elementary, but that sounds good to me.

Also, if your T400 has switchable graphics, using the integrated graphics rather than the ATI will be a big help as well.

I do indeed have switchable graphics, but I don't do anything that requires the ATI graphics so I disabled them from the start.

Thanks for the CherryTree mention.

I use Office 2010 in my linux setup via WINE because I need OneNote, Excel, Word and Visio. LibreOffice murders everything I throw at it, so I don't use. But for basic documents I still use and love AbiWord. Glad to see someone else mention it as it is a very good program and of course, you can't beat the price.

Temetka wrote:Thanks for the CherryTree mention.

I use Office 2010 in my linux setup via WINE because I need OneNote, Excel, Word and Visio. LibreOffice murders everything I throw at it, so I don't use. But for basic documents I still use and love AbiWord. Glad to see someone else mention it as it is a very good program and of course, you can't beat the price.

Here are some decent replacements for the programs you mentioned:
*Word- Abiword
*Excel- Gnumeric
*Onenote- CherryTree

Don't know about Visio, I'm currently on mobile. I'll Google a bit and update tomorrow.

Edit: Googled around a bit, found this page detailing the Gnome office apps.

A replacement for Visio is Dia.

Temetka wrote:Thanks for the CherryTree mention.

I use Office 2010 in my linux setup via WINE because I need OneNote, Excel, Word and Visio. LibreOffice murders everything I throw at it, so I don't use. But for basic documents I still use and love AbiWord. Glad to see someone else mention it as it is a very good program and of course, you can't beat the price.

If you use the windows office packages in any complexity it's better to stick to windows rather than linux. However for basic use i've had no trouble with LO. Altough i use org-mode in Emacs mostly for organising things and Emacs for text.

Well as for "work" useage of Microsoft Apps, I dual boot between Windows and Linux.

But for those times when I am in Linux and just need to look at a file WINE works fine.

RE: DIA. I've used it in the past, somewhat limiting. Last time I used it I couldn't add custom stencils like I can Visio.

But I have played around with CherryTree. That program I like very much.

There's another aspect that I've completely forgotten about- the browser being used. I read up, and apparently Chrome/Chromium are real battery hogs. Will something like Midori be a good substitute in terms of battery life?

So I wiped my SSD and installed Bunsen Labs linux. It's the spiritual successor to #!. It's based on Debian Jessie and kicks [censored]. So I had to add a few things but im getting about 4.5 hours out of my NOS 9-Cell battery on my T410.

Apps I added:

lmsensors
tlp
acpi

After that I ran sudo sensors-detect and ran through the little script. Then I configured tlp and acpi. (Not much to do in acpi). Rebooted the machine and all is running very very well.

For my work stuff I have Windows 7 setup in a VM.

I gave a google a try to find download places for bunsen labs linux. No luck or not quite understanding what to look for to download.

I have tried slitaz and tinycore. Huge issues especially on S3 found in T23 for slitaz (no lxpanel and no menu tab at bottom which I need to know how to fix all this, network had to be manually set and ethernet restarted again by hand in terminal. The two that worked out of box for sllitaz were A31p and Sony Vaio VGN-S480P (P-M fsb 533 with native SATA HD). Tinycore is a pain to get ethernet working every time usually.

Tinycore sometimes fails on x-windows & manager startup on some thinkpad models. Slackware does have neomagic video driver and some linux distributons does but x and window manager usually won't start and crash back to CLI.

There are not much lightweight distributions that is as good as slitaz and tinycore as far as I know. I have not tried puppy yet and I'd love to know any more that so good like those? Also tried antix with no luck.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

On tinycore, for t23 era thinkpads and older, you may need to edit the .xsession file and set the color depth to 16 in order to get X working. Just type startx after you modify the file and the GUI session should show up. This is the only modern distro that does not lag on my 770.

Don't forget to undervolt (RMclock under Windows, phc-intel-dkms under Linux).

Also good luck getting switchable graphics to work in Linux (if you have it).