Linux and x60s powersaving/undervolting?

[syntelman]

Hi!
I have a x60s on the way, should arrive next week, and I plan to use both Linux and Windows on it. However as I've heard Ubuntu etc all suffer from bad power management which makes the laptop hot and drains the battery (which gives you about 50% of the battery life you get in windows). My questions now is if anybody know if Novell SLED suffers from this problem too?

[K0LO]

The newest release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu (Edgy; 6.10) does considerably better power management than the last release (Dapper; 6.06) on my ThinkPad. I now get almost the same battery life in Linux and Windows, although Windows still has the edge. I would estimate the difference to be more like 15%, not 50%.

[syntelman]

That's nice to hear, but do you have a Core Duo CPU?
According to your signature your using a X41 which as far as I know does not use the Core Duo processor and what I've heard this problem is specific for those processors.

[K0LO]

I wasn't aware of that issue. You're correct; I don't have a Core Duo processor in this machine, just a Pentium M, so apparently my observation was not very helpful to your specific issue. Sorry.

[Spif]

This issue is being discussed on the Linux PHC mailing list. Conclusion seems to be that a lot of strange things are going on with Ubuntu installed on the X60/s, which causes low battery life. However, disabling a lot of unnecessary processes seems to help a lot.

Quote from Ari:

:) yeap, there is something funny going on, this time probably due to the fact that i found out that I can drastically reduce power consumption unloading all sorts of modules (with some rationale) such as all usb-related ones, IrDA, PCMCIA, bluetooth, and I can also put the wifi subsystem in low power mode. With this, cpu cores started to enter and stay in C3 state and the machine runs cold in linux for the first time ever.

So: still not equaling winxp but slowly getting there. With the display in Level 0 (bare minimum) i get about 9000mW consumption (7.2 hours), not bad. However winxp gives me about 8h with display in level 3 (a usable level

When I can afford an external disc drive, I will test this out myself. Till then, I'm stuck with WinXP :(

[syntelman]

k0lo: No worries! I'm grateful for you trying to help!

Spif: Yeah, I've seen that too. But I was under the impression that it's the same on other linux distros too but that maybe Novell Suse might work since they sell thinkpads with suse pre-installed if I'm not mistaken. Thanks!