This wiki page has tips on reducing your computer's electricity consumption. If you're using a laptop, it will help extend your battery life.

We tested these tips on a computer running Trisquel 6. Trisquel 6 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The same information should be applicable to Debian, Trisquel 7, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and other Debian derivatives.

Tips & tricks

Suspend the system when you're not using it.

In the BIOS, disable every device that you don't plan to use. For example disabling all the following would save you around 2W: Ethernet (if you only/mostly use wireless) Wireless devices (your computer may have hardware switches for these): Bluetooth WiMAX Wireless WAN (3G) Wifi The touchpad (on a laptop) Sound card (estimated 2W savings): Right-click on the speaker in the task bar and choose "Sound preferences" In the "Hardware" tab, click on your sound card, then select the profile "Off".



Disable wake-on-lan (how?) --which keeps the LAN port active (estimated 1W savings).

Check your power usage statistics with the gnome-power-statistics command

Set your system to reduce the screen brightness after a set amount of inactivity. This can be done in Trisquel Menu -> System Settings -> Brightness and Lock. Change the "Turn off screen when inactive for:" setting to the desired time.

Use a solid state disk drive (SSD) - they use less electricity than regular hard disks.

Useful Packages

Linux-libre (homepage): Upgrade your kernel to its latest version following this guide: trisquel.info/wiki/update-linux-libre-kernel.

(homepage): Upgrade your kernel to its latest version following this guide: trisquel.info/wiki/update-linux-libre-kernel. laptop-mode-tools (homepage) : Tools for Power Savings based on battery/AC status

Laptop mode is automatically enabled after installing this package. Check the ArchLinux extensive documentation about this.

(homepage) : Tools for Power Savings based on battery/AC status Laptop mode is automatically enabled after installing this package. Check the ArchLinux extensive documentation about this. powertop (homepage) - tool to find out what is using power on a laptop

(homepage) - tool to find out what is using power on a laptop rovclock - utility to control frequency rates of your Radeon card

Check the Thinkwiki rovclock documentation about this package

- utility to control frequency rates of your Radeon card Check the Thinkwiki rovclock documentation about this package If you use a HDD, put your Abrowser profile on a ramdisk to avoid spinning the platter. Trisquel comes automatically with a ramdisk at /dev/shm. Note that the ramdisk is volatile, you might want to backup the profile before restarting/shutting down.

Remove excess VTs

Runtime PM

powertop

ls /sys/bus/{pci,i2c}/devices/*/power/control

PCIe ASPM

dmesg|grep -i aspm

update-grub

References and useful links

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Do you use virtual terminals 3-6? Get rid of them by removing /etc/init/tty3.conf ... /etc/init/tty6.conf, reboot.When you runyou may notice that many devices have runtime power management disabled. You can enable them all by echoing auto to their control files as super user, e.g. in a startup script. You can find a list of such files withSome newer hardware and BIOSes support PCIe active state power management. You can checkto see how your system is doing. You can try forcing it by adding to grub configuration, on the kernel line pcie_aspm=force and then runningand rebooting. Watch out for hangs.