An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will allow your computer to continue to function for a period of time when mains power is lost. This can help you to smooth over short-term (1-5 minute) loss of power by running from the UPS battery. When the UPS battery is running low, the UPS can signal your computer to shut down cleanly. With a UPS you can avoid lengthly filesystem or RAID checks due to abrupt power loss. Here are some tips on UPSes in general and how to set one up to protect a Linux machine, even if the model you have lacks explicit Linux support.

For some time I have been using the American Power Conversion (APC) uninterruptible power supply (UPS) daemon Apcupsd to interface my desktop computer with my APC Back-UPS ES 550.

On the face of it, it's hardly news worth noting. On Nov. 27, Eaton announced that its Personal Solution Pac for Linux and Network Shutdown Module v3 are the first UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) power management solutions to receive Ubuntu's IHV (independent hardware vendor) Certification....

Power management on computers has three parts: selecting devices that are more power-efficient, tuning your systems to run more efficiently, and configuring systems to use less power during periods of inactivity. Servers, desktop machines, and laptops usually need different power management schemes; there isn't a one-size-fits-all.

In part 1 of this series we learned how to measure how much power our systems are using, both hardware and software, and some tricks for reducing power usage without degrading performance. Today we're going to dive into the world of power management on laptops: ACPI, APM, hard disk spindowns, and spinups.

The following tweaks assume that you are using an ext3 filesystem for your Ubuntu OS and they will offer a noticeable performance boost! However, there is also a bad side of them… if you don’t have an UPS and your system will power off accidentally or because of a power loss, YOU WILL LOSE IMPORTANT DATA!

PowerTOP is a Linux tool that finds the software component(s) that make your laptop use more power than necessary while it is idle. As of Linux kernel version 2.6.21, the kernel no longer has a fixed 1000Hz timer tick. This will (in theory) give a huge power savings because the CPU stays in low power mode for longer periods of time during system idle.

Linux has a lot of advantages as a desktop operating system. Power management, unfortunately, still is not one of them. But there are plenty of ways to make a Linux system less power-hungry -- and some of the most effective fixes are also some of the easiest.

PowerTOP is a Linux tool that finds the software component(s) that make your laptop use more power than necessary while it is idle. As of Linux kernel version 2.6.21, the kernel no longer has a fixed 1000Hz timer tick. This will (in theory) give a huge power savings because the CPU stays in low power mode for longer periods of time during system idle.