[lhrogerss]

I have been learning about Ubuntu as an option for speeding up my sluggish Mini 9 with Windows XP. I read that Dell worked to optimize Ubuntu 8.04 for the Mini 9 and achieved good battery life, but the 8.04 look and feel is a bit outdated. So does the new 10.04 Netbook Edition work as well with the Mini 9 as 8.04? I guess battery life is my biggest concern.

Thanks,

Luke

[reflex]

I wouldn't worry too much about 10.04 or 10.10 being battery hogs compared to the pre-installed Ubuntu.

Disabling/uninstalling fancy desktop effects may help ("compiz"). Turning the brightness down really helps and/or setting the screen to turn off quickly when idle. Turning off wifi definitely helps (but cripples the usefulness of a NETbook ). You can also try using the program "powertop", it might give you a few more power saving tweaks (but I don't think it helps you make the tweaks persistent).

[Veazer]

Originally Posted by reflex

I wouldn't worry too much about 10.04 or 10.10 being battery hogs compared to the pre-installed Ubuntu.

Disabling/uninstalling fancy desktop effects may help ("compiz"). Turning the brightness down really helps and/or setting the screen to turn off quickly when idle. Turning off wifi definitely helps (but cripples the usefulness of a NETbook ). You can also try using the program "powertop", it might give you a few more power saving tweaks (but I don't think it helps you make the tweaks persistent).

Brightness seems to be a huge factor, wifi much less than i thought. As for compiz, i'd have to vote the opposite. Why? Try this... Add a system monitor CPU load to your panel. Turn compiz off and start moving windows around and working with the system. Moving a window quickly will raise cpu use to around 60-70% on my mini. Now try it again with basic compiz effects and you'll see that window manipulation has almost no cpu load, even if you shake them around like crazy.

OTOH, maybe offloading to the gpu still ultimately raises power draw, i'd like to see a comparison. i suspect that the cpu would draw more though.