So looking for new ways to extend your laptop battery life??  Just recently I found a great combo that involves using a very cool application called “Jupiter“

You can grab Jupiter from the launchpad PPA @ https://launchpad.net/~webupd8team/+archive/jupiter

I have yet to find a good application that handles “On Demand” mode relatively well. This app clocks down your processors when on battery to their lowest setting and kicks them back up once A/C power is restored. I have used other linux power mgmt tools but haven’t had a great experience. I have a system76 Pangolin and it’s pretty power hungry, it’s pretty much a mobile desktop and during the Natty / Oneiric releases of Ubuntu I was lucky to get 40 minutes on the beast. But that was because everything was running full power, After installing Jupiter and making some additional changes I managed to turn 40 minutes into 2 hours. Not bad eh?

Some of the additional changes I made involved the following:

Taking /var/log and completely mounting it to tmpfs. This way we are writing straight to memory, not needing to bother the disk constant reads/writes. Take note that this causes your logs to clear out at the end of every reboot/shutdown, but I’ve seen improvement.

So first we need to make some modifications in /etc/fstab

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

Save that off

Then lets carry out the following.

$ sudo service rsyslog status // to check if it’s up and running
$ sudo service rsyslog stop
$ sudo rm -rf /tmp/*
$ sudo rm -rf /var/log/*
$ sudo rm -rf /var/tmp/*
$ sudo mount -a
$ sudo service rsyslog start

Now you will notice all system logs will be directed to /tmp. Give it a try for a week or two and see if you notice any difference in your battery life.


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