TLP, a tool to extend the battery of our laptop

Currently, not only the autonomy of smartphones is a problem, but also the autonomy of laptops, devices that still have a lot of life left as well as their older brothers, desktop PCs. In the market there are many solutions to alleviate this problem, almost all or rather, those that work best are those that are based on modifying the software of the parts of our hardware, such as frequency scaling, but there are usually no tools that are based on modifying the software of our team and that give good results. Within this group is TLP, a great tool that allows us to considerably extend the autonomy of our laptop (or netbook) based on modifications in our system.

TLP development is going from strength to strength and they are currently at version 0.5, which substantially improves TLP interaction on IBM ThinkPad devices. TLP's skills include the option of powersave, not only from the battery but also from other elements such as wifi or the processor, this is achieved thanks to the incorporation of modules in the system kernel. In addition, TLP modifies the behavior of the other components, in such a way that if we do not use an element such as audio, Wake On LAN or a PCI slot, such items are disabled to reduce power consumption. As for other elements such as discs (both optical and hard), TLP changes the behavior of the system in front of them in such a way that if they are not used they are disconnected in the case of the optical reader or lower the speed of revolutions in the case of the hard drive, thus saving energy and battery.

TLP was born as a result of seeking an improvement in the models IBM ThinkPad, so if we have these models, in addition to all of the above, we can recalibrate the battery or solve small battery behavior problems.

How to install TLP in Ubuntu

To this day, TLP is not found in the official Ubuntu repositories but it does not mean that we cannot install it, to do the installation we open the terminal and write:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa: linrunner / tlp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw

With the first line we install the developer's repository, with the second we update our repositories and with the third we install the necessary packages for TLP to work. According to the behavior of TLP, every time we start the system, TLP will be loaded by default, but for this, we first have to run it a first time and then restart the system.

sudo tlp start

With the latest version, TLP gives conflict problems with Laptop-Mode-Tools, so before installing TLP it is necessary to remove it as follows

sudo apt-get remove laptop-mode-tools

Even so, if you still have problems or want to know more about TLP, I recommend that you stop by your page, has quite a lot of information about the program.