Ubuntu 10.10 draining my battery?

[Poppa_Meth]

I got Ubuntu 10.10 setup on my HP DV4-1281us about a week ago. It's been running good with one issue. During normal operation the battery seems to discharge at about the same rate that Vista did. However, once I shut the laptop down, complete shutdown, the battery continues to discharge. I get as much as a 20% loss overnight. Vista never had any such issues. I've read a little about some repeated kernel issues for the past several versions of Ubuntu that have shown the same behavior. It's a real pain. Anyone know of any fixes for this or if a different version of linux does not have this issue? I'm willing to try a Debian based build of Mint if that would fix the issue.

[deckard8]

I got Ubuntu 10.10 setup on my HP DV4-1281us about a week ago. It's been running good with one issue. During normal operation the battery seems to discharge at about the same rate that Vista did. However, once I shut the laptop down, complete shutdown, the battery continues to discharge. I get as much as a 20% loss overnight. Vista never had any such issues. I've read a little about some repeated kernel issues for the past several versions of Ubuntu that have shown the same behavior. It's a real pain. Anyone know of any fixes for this or if a different version of linux does not have this issue? I'm willing to try a Debian based build of Mint if that would fix the issue.

Is wifi staying on after shutdown ?
Also I think I read somewhere there is a bug in the battery meter app in Ubuntu.

[Poppa_Meth]

There is a bug in the meter. It flat out doesn't work for me. So I've installed a different app that works just fine. It's definitely draining charge though because it was completely dead the last time I tried to turn it on. Drained 30% in two days of downtime. I turned off the wireless in hardware last night before shutdown so I'll see this evening if that is the issue. This is the only real problem I'm having so far. Some people say that the Debian kernel has fixed this long ago, but it keeps recurring in Ubuntu. I may have to switch to one of the Mint Debian builds if this keeps up. I guess I could just pop the battery every time.

[jman98]

Reference to the bug here:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/7205/laptops-battery-is-stuck-on-estimating
It does affect HP laptops.

The PowerTop program may help you to determine what is sucking your battery power.
http://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/improve-your-laptops-battery-life-with-...-ubuntu-linux/

[Poppa_Meth]

Those bug references seem to be mainly for the battery meter, but do not address the actual battery drain issue. I found a few topics about this back in 2009/2010 but they keep closing the bug as resolved and it keeps cropping back up. What I'm seeing is not just the battery gauge reporting incorrectly.

[jman98]

Those bug references seem to be mainly for the battery meter, but do not address the actual battery drain issue. I found a few topics about this back in 2009/2010 but they keep closing the bug as resolved and it keeps cropping back up. What I'm seeing is not just the battery gauge reporting incorrectly.

Fair enough, but did you not see what I put at the bottom of my post about PowerTop? Of course if you would prefer to ignore something that might help you get to the bottom of your problem that's fine with me.

[Poppa_Meth]

No, I'm not ignoring it. I'm just at work and keeping posts brief. I do already have PowerTop installed on the machine. I just haven't had a chance to run it and see what it can tell me. I'm curious to see if PowerTop can actually help me with this. It seems that it would tell me what is drawing power while the machine is running, but what about when it is powered down, which is when the problem is occurring?

Thanks for the input.

[TBoneit]

"once I shut the laptop down, complete shutdown" Impossible if the laptop is off how can any software drain the battery? just closing the lid of course is not off.

[Poppa_Meth]

"once I shut the laptop down, complete shutdown" Impossible if the laptop is off how can any software drain the battery? just closing the lid of course is not off.

That's what I thought, but evidently that is not the case. It's not an actively running software that keeps the devices going. It's evidently something about the way it performs the shutdown. Evidently if I were to hard power it off by holding the Power button I would not get the battery drain. At least that's what I've been told. I think it may pertain to the power state Ubuntu is putting the machine in on shutdown. Evidently when Windows performs the shutdown it does something differently. It makes me wonder if Ubuntu is not putting it into deep poweroff somehow. I know some of my desktop machines will leave power going to the USB ports when the machine is fully shut down and it looks like that could be the issue here.

[Poppa_Meth]

PowerTop is definitely showing the wireless as the biggest drain. Disabling that manually before shutdown helps. I'm down to about a 5%-10% loss overnight instead of 20%. Other ports are still remaining active evidently. I've seen a little info about writing a script that will unload certain modules at shutdown that would supposedly fix this, but it can cause other issues as well. I guess I'll either have to keep working at it or pop the battery each time. I do have a friends laptop that he wants to put Linux on so I think I'll try Mint Debian on his and see how the battery behaves there. It is a similar model to mine.

[TBoneit]

Obviously if it is draining the battery it isn't shutting down properly. Good Luck

[Poppa_Meth]

I got Mint Debian installed and configured on the other laptop. It drains about 10% overnight with the wifi shut off. That could be the old 6-cell battery in this one. Mine is a fairly new 12-cell and should not be loosing 20% overnight. Maybe it's something about HP hardware that doesn't like linux.

[Poppa_Meth]

I finally reinstalled Ubuntu with a very vanilla configuration. The problem still persisted. I blanked the drive and installed Mint DE on it and so far so good. I loose about 3-4% overnight, which was about normal with vista. I guess there really is a repetitive bug in the Ubuntu kernel that has been fixed in the Debian build.

[TreeTops]

Would you try Puppy Linux and see if that drains the battery when you shut down?

[Poppa_Meth]

At this point I won't be messing with it anymore unless I come across a spare drive again. I have an old desktop I'm about to try an XFCE build on an another old desktop I'm considering turning into a server. Too many things at once here. If I find a spare drive I may give Puppy a shot to see what happens.

[Red2012]

I've got the same problem with the hp dm1z. Ubuntu drained 20% of my battery for the two days I didn't use the laptop. I can confirm this due to the fact that after the day it drained 20% I fully charged the battery and removed it to see if the battery was the problem. After two days, I plugged the battery in and started ubuntu in which the battery still had 98%. So I think its a power management problem.

[nic2k4]

Here's some acknowledgement of the problem:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_mobile_uffda&num=1

[Poppa_Meth]

Well it's nice to know that the problem is acknowledged even though that still does seem to be the actual issue I've had. That seems to be more of a problem with an actively running system. Looks like that will only add to the problem.

[Roman Voznyuk]

I have exactly the same problem with my HP G42.
It drains battery while shut down around 5-10% a day.
It started happening when I;ve installed Ubuntu 10.10, and also the same issue with Ubutu 11.04.

However it doesn't happen at 10.04.

[Poppa_Meth]

I started noticing similar issues in Mint now, though still not as bad. Since I'm running the Debian built I got a kernel update the other day. I guess I now have one of the kernel versions affected by the regressions.

[Roman Voznyuk]

I have found the source of the problems.
Looks like Ubuntu developed wanted to enable "wake-on-lan" feature in newer releases.

From file /etc/init.d/halt

# Make it possible to not shut down network interfaces,
# needed to use wake-on-lan
netdown="-i"
if [ "$NETDOWN" = "no" ]; then
netdown=""
fi

log_action_msg "Will now halt"
halt -d -f $netdown $poweroff $hddown


I'm not sure where the variable $NETDOWN comes from, but what I did I just replace line
halt -d -f $netdown $poweroff $hddown
to
halt -d -f -i $poweroff $hddown

And everything works fine now (I'm at 11.04 64-bits).

[Poppa_Meth]

I'll take a look at that tonight in Mint and see if it helps. Wake-on-LAN if fine if you need it but the option to disable it should be in power management and it should actually work.