problem powerbook 5,6 & battery

benoitc · Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 4:40 pm Post subject: problem powerbook 5,6 & battery

I actually use a powerbook5,,6 under linux .

I enabled powernowd & pbbuttonsd but I have only 1h45 on the battery. When I'm on macosx, I more than 3 hours. Even when I am on max performances on macosx I have 2 hours. Any idee what's going on ? Which time do yiu have on your machine ?

Suer7reus · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Nov 2003 Posts: 106

I don't really do the Mac thing (and I'm not sure from version numbers 5,,6 if yours is ppc or x86), but on my x86 laptops CPU frequency scaling makes a big difference. It sounds like when OSX has the processor scaled all the way up it only beats you by 15 mins (2hrs vs 1:45), which could be due to less dramatic factors like screen dimming, hard drive power conservation, etc. If you could scale your processor down, perhaps you could be closer to the 3hr OSX figure. Check out the Gentoo power management guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml and look at kernel options and userspce daemons (cpufrequtils) for CPU frequency scaling.

benoitc · Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 5:04 pm Post subject:

Indeed I forget to give more details

Processord is scaled to 867 Mhz (1667 max) and I set the hd to powersave : hdparm -B 1 /dev/hda. I don't know if it's enough. But it's weird because I have 2 hours in max cpu speed on osx.

JoseJX · Retired Dev Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 2774

Take a look at the PPC FAQ (link below), but basically, power saving measures like CPU frequency scaling and backlight dimming will result in about the same performance. pbbuttonsd can manage the backlight and a number of options are available for the CPU frequency scaling.
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Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

timotheus25 · Posted: Sun Sep 03, 2006 7:01 am Post subject:

If you use a radeon card, don't forget: