8.04 macbook pro and battery / machine drain

[phonky]

Hi there

I love linux and ubuntu.

I have a MBP 2.2.

I ran 7.04 and 7.10, but
I went back to OSX only for a sad reason:
When running ubuntu my machine roars and sweats all the time!!!
The fan spins wild and is very loud, it probably gets hotter and is heavier on resource consumption.

Battery life span is much smaller compare to OSX. I don't blame ubuntu, I know where this all comes from. But these are facts. I tried to optimize battery life with the proposed app (don't remember its name now), but haven't been very successful.

Wondering if 8.04 improved here...any experiences???

thank you so much

[cyberdork33]

battery consumption is still not as good as in OSX. That will probably never change.

Most people complain about their fans not running, so I don't know why you say that. It will still run warmer though.

[xeth_delta]

I think the OP was referring to the fact that the fans were at high speed all the time. I think you will agree with me that it would suggest that either some program was using a quite a lot of CPU power all the time, or CPU frequency scaling was not working, and hence the cores might have been kept at a high frequency.

Even without these kind of problems, as cyberdork33 mentioned, the battery life will not be as good as in OSX, at least not right now.

To be fair, though, battery life has improved a lot in Linux along the different kernel and distros iterations, so I guess there is space for further improvements.

To the OP, I have a couple of suggestions. Open a terminal and checl if there is any program using a lot of CPU time:

top

To find out the frequency (I am doing this on a Macbook, so the files will hopefully be in the same place):

sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq
sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq

There is a very useful utility called powertop, which will let you know what programs / processes are causing the most wake-ups-from-idle. I am not sure if it is in the repositories, though. This is its website http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

[phonky]

OK, thank you guys, very helpful responses.

I´ll give it another go with 8.04 and see how it goes.

I had installed powertop but everytime I executed the proposed fixes it seemed it resetted to previous settings on a new reboot. Does the stuff need to be recompiled into the kernel to be effective?

I had an own kernel compiled with 7.10, that was pretty well. Battery life is not too important to me if it is in acceptable range. I am more concerned about the life span of my machine, if the fans run at high speed it means the cpu is running wild and the resources are used up and the machine is getting hotter and...and...resulting possibly in a lower life span for my MBP.

Do you guys agree on this?

[xeth_delta]

OK, thank you guys, very helpful responses.

I´ll give it another go with 8.04 and see how it goes.

I had installed powertop but everytime I executed the proposed fixes it seemed it resetted to previous settings on a new reboot. Does the stuff need to be recompiled into the kernel to be effective?

I had an own kernel compiled with 7.10, that was pretty well. Battery life is not too important to me if it is in acceptable range. I am more concerned about the life span of my machine, if the fans run at high speed it means the cpu is running wild and the resources are used up and the machine is getting hotter and...and...resulting possibly in a lower life span for my MBP.

Do you guys agree on this?

I remember that at least some of the changes proposed by powertop are not automatically kept, for example the "noatime" option. You have to add that to /etc/fstab.

If you need any help with that, we would be glad to help.

The fact that the fans were running that high would seem to indicate that something was keeping the CPU at a high frequency. The good news is the behaviour you described is no normal for linux and that it can most likely be fixed. We would have to try to find out what causes it.

Just as an example, my MacBook runs quietly most of the time, the exception being of course when performing some CPU intensive task.

About the temperature. Your CPU was most likely at a safe temperature, given that the fans were working hard, but I am sure the noise is annoying, nevertheless. That's not to say too hogh temperatures can't affect in the long term the life span of a CPU, but you should first check if that is the case on your machine. The easiest way would be to simply check the CPU temperature. There is a program called "coretemp" that should help you with that on your MBP. It does on my MB.

[phonky]

There is a program called "coretemp" that should help you with that on your MBP. It does on my MB.

I think that´s the one I was running, temperature would be shown on the panel for the HD and the CPU. I remember the icons being red shortly after booting, the temp was constantly around 55 degrees Celsius, more or less.

[xeth_delta]

I think that´s the one I was running, temperature would be shown on the panel for the HD and the CPU. I remember the icons being red shortly after booting, the temp was constantly around 55 degrees Celsius, more or less.

Hmm, the one I use is just a command line version. 55 C is not really that much. Was that all the time?

[cyberdork33]

55 is not that bad on a portable machine. It is a bit warm, but not bad.

[phonky]

Hmm, the one I use is just a command line version. 55 C is not really that much. Was that all the time?

Pretty much all the time. Certainly not at boot, which would be around 30ish, but would rise quickly to that. I can´t remember being more than 60 though

[Rog-Mahal]

Right now powertop tells me I'm running about 23 watts with wifi running and stock power management. Any tricks to reduce it? I think under 7.10 I had it running in the teens with some tweaks. Any advice? I don't want to install laptop-mode because of the heavy disk parking. I'd appreciate any help.