You are here: Front page / Articles / Slackware and Zenwalk battery test
Author: Carsten Boysen Jensen
6 May 2009
A small follow-up to The big Linux distribution/environment battery test in order to give Slackware justice with a 30 min. test. And to show how Zenwalk compares.
Laptop make and model: Zepto Znote 3215W
The tests were run on a clean machine. A small script was used to force the laptop into powersaving but no other tweaks were done.
Script used for battery-savings can be found here: savebattery.sh
All battery tests are run with machine idling and the lid closed, to get better constant than me working at the machine. So these numbers show minimum consumption possible on this laptop. On environments that made the laptop suspend when the lid closed this feature was disabled.
The RAM numbers are real RAM usage, meaning the -/+ numbers given by 'free -m'. And they are in MB.
All times were taken with the same stopwatch. And with fresh restarts and full battery.
I crapped the mAh directly from the /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
Battery-life is calculated on basis of test duration (in seconds) and used mAh. Time is given in the format hours:minutes:seconds and represents the maximum you can have this laptop turned while running on battery.
Slackware note: Tests run on a single
installation (full). Graphical environments started with 'startx'
to avoid loading kdelibs (kdm) with the window managers, etc. Xfce 4.6.0 on 12.2 is a build by rworkman
. Slackware-current was a snapshot from 21 April.
Zenwalk note: gdm installed and run by default, this may or may not harm the battery life.
Test duration: 30 minutes.
First the numbers when run without graphical environments.
| Date | Distribution | Kernel version | Boot time | RAM | mAh | Bat.-life |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20090414 | Slackware 12.2 | 2.6.27.7 (huge-smp) | 0:42 | 42 | 432 | 5:33:20 |
| 20090423 | Slackware-current | 2.6.29.1 (huge-smp) | 0:41 | 34 | 432 | 5:33:20 |
RAM usage differs otherwise the same.
| Date | Distribution | Environment | Time start | Boot total | RAM | mAh | Bat.-life |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20090413 | Slackware 12.2 | Blackbox 0.65.0 | 0:09 | 0:49 | 74 | 384 | 6:15:00 |
| 20090422 | Slackware-current | Blackbox 0.70.1 | 0:07 | 0:47 | 107 | 432 | 5:33:20 |
| 20090413 | Slackware 12.2 | Fluxbox 1.1.1 | 0:07 | 0:47 | 71 | 384 | 6:15:00 |
| 20090422 | Slackware-current | Fluxbox 1.1.1 | 0:09 | 0:51 | 107 | 384 | 6:15:00 |
| 20090413 | Slackware 12.2 | Fvwm2 2.4.20 | 0:08 | 0:48 | 70 | 384 | 6:15:00 |
| 20090424 | Zenwalk 6.0.1 Gnome Edition | Gnome 2.26.0 | 0:20 | 0:51 | 186 | 528 | 4:32:43 |
| 20090414 | Slackware 12.2 | KDE 3.5.10 | 0:12 | 1:02 | 98 | 432 | 5:33:20 |
| 20090422 | Slackware-current | KDE 4.2.2 | 0:39 | 1:22 | 240 | 432 | 5:33:20 |
| 20090413 | Slackware 12.2 | Twm 1.0.4 | 0:08 | 0:48 | 78 | 384 | 6:15:00 |
| 20090413 | Slackware 12.2 | WindowMaker 0.92.0 | 0:08 | 0:48 | 72 | 432 | 5:33:20 |
| 20090422 | Slackware-current | WindowMaker 0.92.0 | 0:08 | 0:47 | 107 | 384 | 6:15:00 |
| 20090413 | Slackware 12.2 | Xfce 4.4.3 | 0:14 | 0:55 | 127 | 528 | 4:32:43 |
| 20090421 | Slackware 12.2 | Xfce 4.6.0 | 0:13 | 0:53 | 169 | 576 | 4:10:00 |
| 20090422 | Slackware-current | Xfce 4.6.0 | 0:14 | 0:55 | 156 | 480 | 5:00:00 |
| 20090424 | Zenwalk 6.0 Standard Edition | Xfce 4.6.0 | 0:10 | 0:41 | 191 | 528 | 4:32:43 |
There really isn't that big a difference between the environments. Xfce and Gnome seems to be consistent in having worse battery time compared with KDE while the lesser environments are a little better.
I have done multiple tests with Xfce and have been unable to reproduce the 8+ hours battery life I got from December 16, 2008 in the previous article.
All in all Xfce 4.4.3 seems to be jumping all over the place, as this table shows:
| Panel-plugins | RAM | mAh | Bat.-life |
| none | 126 | 672 | 3:34:17 |
| volume-menu-plugin | 137 | 480 | 5:00:00 |
Run in Slackware 12.2 on 13 April 2009.
Not only does this not compare with the results in the above table, it now uses less battery when running an panel-plugin, which is the opposite than my previous experience.
I don't consider Xfce reliable as I have experienced it eating all RAM. Some kind of bug somewhere, I guess.
Anyway, my conclusion from the last article still stands.
The contents was last modified on 20 May 2009, at 01:45 (CEST)