lenovo energy manager for ubuntu

[ebram96]

I'm a Lenovo Y50-70 user , there was windows 8.1 pre-installed OS , now for my job I'm enforced to use Linux Ubuntu on my device ... but can't find any drivers support for linux ?! which is not so cool . My highest priority now is Lenovo Energy Management app ,,,, I need it most to keep the battery in a good state ..

[conwaytwt]

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@ebram96 wrote:

I'm a Lenovo Y50-70 user , there was windows 8.1 pre-installed OS , now for my job I'm enforced to use Linux Ubuntu on my device ... but can't find any drivers support for linux ?! which is not so cool . My highest priority now is Lenovo Energy Management app ,,,, I need it most to keep the battery in a good state ..

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What drivers does Ubuntu NOT support? My E540 has been pretty well supported overall.

As for power management, there are a few options, but TLP sounds good. Whatever you try, only use one at a time!

I only just installed TLP, so as of today I have little experience with it. It's mostly automatic, so once you install it you may not need to adjust it much.

It's not available in the standard Ubuntu repositories, so you'll have to get it from elsewhere. Here's a short article with instructions.

 UPDATE: I've been reading more, and I found some more things that might be helpfu:

PowerTOP is an Intel utility that shows exactly which processes and which parts of your system are using power. Obviously it can help quantify issues when you are trying different power management techniques. Fortunately it's readily available in Ubuntu repositories

$ apt-get install powertop

If you're specifically interested in limiting your battery's charge to make it last longer, I found a question on AskUbuntu.com about that very issue on a Lenovo system. Unfortunately, as you can see, the answers vary depending upon which Lenovo computer you have, so what works for my ThinkPad E540 might or might not work for your Y50-70.

Please be sure to report back here when you find things that work (and don't work)!

[CBHedricks]

Will your company allow a "dual boot" scenario? Might just give you a good option. Otherwise keep windows on there long enough to condition the battery then make your recovery DVD and move forward with wiping the disk for Linux only install.

I have yet to find a battery management program that can mimic the Lenovo utility, but the search is ongoing.

[conwaytwt]

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@CBHedricks wrote:
I have yet to find a battery management program that can mimic the Lenovo utility, but the search is ongoing.

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Being totally new to Lenovo (and not having used Windows since version 3.11)  what features does the Lenovo Windows utility have that you like?

I have found that under Linux the default (apparently from the BIOS) behavior is NOT very battery friendly -- it keeps charging and discharging the battery between 94% and 100% when on the AC adapter. Fortunately that's one thing that is very easy to fix with TLP.

P.S.: Unfortunately, at least under Ubuntu 14.04, the battery charge/discharge indicator does not keep up with reality. I haven't tracked down a solution yet.

[ColonelONeill]

If you have TLP and tp-smapi (acpi-call for Sandy Bridge and later), edit the TLP config file to set battery thresholds.

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-configuration.html#chargethresholds

xfce4-power-manager seems to reflect the proper battery status on my X61t at least.

[conwaytwt]

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@ColonelONeill wrote:

If you have TLP and tp-smapi (acpi-call for Sandy Bridge and later), edit the TLP config file to set battery thresholds.

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-configuration.html#chargethresholds

xfce4-power-manager seems to reflect the proper battery status on my X61t at least.

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Yes, as I had already discovered, TLP makes setting the charge threshholds simple. 

Thank you also for mentioning the other desktop environments, because I had not tried them yet.

Unfortunately on my E540 apparently the bad battery information must be coming from the firmware somehow, because xfce and Gnome indicators seem to "agree," but aren't being updated to reflect the current battery condition.

For example the first time I plugged in the laptop the charge indicator went to 100%, and after that it discharged to 94% and then up to 99%. The 99% (it may be an even lower percentage now) probably reflects actual "normal" wear on the battery, but I don't know why the battery indicators aren't "learning" the new normal when it gets to "full." Apparently the firmware can't tell when the charging is done.

Now that I have TLP set, it's not cycling a "full" battery and wearing it unnecessarily -- I have it set to stop at 80% (and the indicator has said 79% for several days). SO maybe TLP "knows" the right place to stop better than the indicators do.

[ColonelONeill]

Wear on the battery is generally never reflected in the percentage readout (which is current capacity divided by full charge capacity, not design capacity).

By default the charging thresholds are 96 to 100%, so you might have been seeing the default thresholds in action.

[conwaytwt]

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@ColonelONeill wrote:
Wear on the battery is generally never reflected in the percentage readout (which is current capacity divided by full charge capacity, not design capacity).

By default the charging thresholds are 96 to 100%, so you might have been seeing the default thresholds in action.

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"generally never!"

All I can say is my E540 has only gotten to 100% once, and it never indicates the battery is fully charged, though it does seem to stop charging -- it will just stay at the same percentage.

I think it's likely the BIOS and the standard linux utilities don't communicate well on this model.

My E540 also always shows a fan speed of zero, even when I can clearly hear the fan spin up when I push the processors hard. Fortunately it does seem to operate correctly, and the temperature (so far) has stayed below 100 degrees.

[conwaytwt]

ColonelONeill, I want to thank you for suggesting that xfce4-power-manager works better on your system. Yesterday I installed lubuntu-desktop xubuntu-desktop AND kubuntu-desktop (to my "straight" Ubuntu system) and tried the well-known (to me) lxde and xcfe desktops and the power manager behavior LOOKS very similar as in Unity/GNOME -- the battery reports very odd things in the controls, and the laptop doesn't reliably detect when I unplug the power and am running on the battery. (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu seem to think I'm running on the battery all the time.)

Today I realized I forgot to try KDE -- and despite a false start or two* I have discovered that its power manager behaves quite differently. KDE knows when my E540 is plugged in or unplugged, and seems to report sensible things about the battery condition. SO for further investigation I will be using Kubuntu/KDE for a few days.

I'm also enjoying tinkering with it and realizing it has been several years since I used KDE regularly and it has matured quite a bit. (Of course all the desktops have evolved over time; not always perfectly!)

To be really certain I think I will want to make more live images -- Kubuntu, especially, but also Xubuntu and Lubuntu -- for further testing so I can easily and most reliably switch to a "standardized" setup. It's possible lxde would work differently if I had booted straight into it, for example.

*P.S.: After my experience I definitely recommend a reboot when switching to KDE! I left the room and came back to unlock my screen and found that apparently lightdm and maybe a couple of screensavers were battling for control and wouldn't recognize my password. I was able to switch to a VT and found gnome-screensaver had a couple of processes running under the lightdm user and I was able to kill one off and get to a KDE-acceptable password field. All seems to be working much better after a reboot.

[SmiCH]

Hi, I have Lenovo Z500 user, which runs ubuntu 14.04. I tried to find some sollution to limit the charging between 80% and 60% but I did not find anything. Do you have any ideas how would it be possible. TLP is not working on my ideapad.
Cheers.