Monday, June 7, 2010

A change from the usual ubuntu-ness

Wow, its been a bit. I hadn't intended for this blog to drag along so severely on updates, but I am in the middle of graduating college, and if theres one priority thats going to drop a little behind, its going to be blogging a bunch of random crap about ubuntu.

In case the lot of you haven't heard, Iphone OS 4 has been all officially announced, along with the new hardware that seems (to me, at least) to be a more or less direct response to all the android handsets that have been popping up lately, and the benefits that they (previously) held over the Iphone.

Unfortunately, as cool as it looks, in many ways it may just be too little to late, in a few ways. The multitasking, the 5mp camera, the high res screen, while cool, are the hardware specs that Apple will be selling for the next year. A year. Considering whats happened on a much faster scale in the world of Android, and the fact that most Android phones had the multitasking and that high of a iso camera, its only going to be a short time to be passed and far surpassed on screen res and front facing camera. Apple has thrown out new hardware that ought to last a year, but they should have released a year ago. HTC and whoever else is making the crapload of android handsets are going to have absolutely no trouble whatsoever it passing that up.

So, I'm impressed, sort of, and excited to get a software update on my ipod touch, but overall, pretty happy to see that Apple has kinda left the door that was previously cracked wide open for google to keep pushing forward on Android.

In other unrelated news, I got a replacement laptop from Dell. By the way, I absolutely hate dell, with a fiery passion, for all they've put me through in the last 10 months with shipping me crap hardware over and over again. This computer has no dead pixels or dead hard drives, so it's staying for now. But its got a 1 gb ATI card and it guzzles battery like nobodies business. Thus:

Why Does Battery Life Still Suck on Ubuntu?


Seriously. I'm no technical expert, I've got no degree in electronics. But I get up to an hour and a half less battery on Ubuntu then on Windows. Thats a pretty severe issue.

It's really just disappointing. I wish that I could get more efficient performance from completely configurable software, but alas, no go.

So I have not really so much to say, as a question: How do you guys extend battery life in Ubuntu? Because this new computer with 1 gb video card and an i7 is killing me when I'm on the go.



Sorry this post is more or less strung together whiny thoughts, but whatev. I'll be coming back strong in about 6 days, when I finish all my finals and move back home and get comfortable. I've got a new/old PC to start dorking around with building a home server, so I'll post a few thoughts about that I'm sure.

4 comments:

  1. Yeah, I get about 40% (3 hours) of my system's advertised battery life (7 hours) on Ubuntu, even after all the tweaking I could do. Before tweaking, it was along 30% (2 hours). That's just the way it is, Linux sucks at battery life and they don't seem to do a lot about it, or about things that would help battery life indirectly (sleeping/hibernating?).

    Most guides on improving battery life say to use powertop, and it indeed is a nice tool to see what exactly is draining your juice. However, you'll find that most of it is being sucked by poorly written hardware drivers, which you can't really disable (unless you don't want your keyboard to work, or something). Here's a good guide for improving battery life in general:
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=729644

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  2. i've been goofing around with powertop all day. unfortunately, the number one culprit of wakeups is my mouse and keyboard. :P

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  3. Mine is the load balancing tick bug:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/524281
    The kind of bug that halves every laptop's battery life for the affected processors, and yet it made it into Lucid Final.

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  4. Ha. Yeah, I get that one as well.

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