Improving Battery Life / Fixing Screen Brightness on Dell Mini 1010, Ubuntu 10.04
I recall when I first got my mini 10 it got really great battery life, on the order of 7.5-8 hours on a full charge. As of late I noticed that I was only hitting around 4 hours at best, which, while still great, is a lot shy of what I was used to. I came across this article over at ProductiveGeek that outlined methods for reclaiming some battery life on Ubuntu laptops, which provided some help. The major issue was that since 9.10, the screen brightness keys had entirely ceased to function, the brightness was fixed at maximum no matter what I did. I eventually found that the fix was simple enough.sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
I added the following line in the first uncommented block: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_backlight=vendor"A quick reboot showed that this was sufficient to return function to the brightness keys, and substantially boost my peak battery life.
The remainder of the changes I employed can be summed up as follows:
- Enable power saving mode on the CPU:
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_saving
- Cut down on disk-writes that only keep access times up-to-date:
mount -o remount,relatime /
- Enable power saving mode on hard drive:
hdparm -B 1 -S 12 /dev/sda
- Enable Ubuntu's "Laptop Mode" power management (replace the 0 with 5):
sudo gedit /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
- Make shortcuts for turning wifi completely off (and back on):
Putting the following in a .sh file, or simply running them at the terminal, will flip the wifi on and off (like the keyboard shortcut does on Windows).
sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower offsudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower on