Linux power management and optimus

Hey guys,

I just bought a new laptop, the Asus UL30JT.
It has an insane battery life and uses Nvidia Optimus to switch between and integrated and dedicated graphics card seamlessly which also saves power. On windows i can get up to 8 hours of battery life on it.

However I prefer linux, more specifically Ubuntu and Arch linux distros. When i use ubuntu my battery life suffers to a meager 2-3 hours even with the lower power options selected. I suspect that it is caused by the fact that nvidia hasn't written and optimus driver for linux and therefore both cards are running simultaneously.

Can anyone shed some light on this topic? i would much rather be running linux and if there are any other ways of managing the power i would really like to know about them. I need to squeeze at least 6 hours out of it.

 

There is a Launchpad Team working on Hybrid-Linux Graphics.

Gentoo Wiki on UL30LT

 

While im working on that, anyone else have some power saving tips for linux?