Powermanagement in Linux

Here I am, running Kubuntu on my Thinkpad laptop and it works pretty well. One thing I'm not too impressed with though is powermanagement but I did know it was being worked and the latest kernel had some improvements in that regard. It seems this is a focus area for the next release of Ubuntu and the improvements in the kernel is certainly helping:

Tickless kernel. The new dynticks and hi-res timers make a *huge* difference. Ben Collins mentioned 30 - 40 minutes of extra battery life with dynticks and hi-res timers enabled. This stuff is new in 2.6.21, and already in the Gutsy kernel. dynticks also make it possible for the CPU to sleep much more. Another thing that's important in that respect is HPET, basically doing something similar, but less effective. Every bit helps, however.

Read the rest of Sebastian Küglers post.

Oh...I almost forgot, but I want to repeat what is said in that post: Avoid ATI (now AMD) graphics cards/chips - their support for Linux sucks bigtime! It seems they simply just don't care. Vote with your wallet guys - buy Intel, they provide proper open source drivers!