Enable laptop mode on Ubuntu

Laptop Mode is a setting that allows you to extend the battery life of your laptop. It does this by changing how the kernel distributes disk I/O over time. Linux normally does disk I/O in small amounts, nicely spread out over time. But this way, the hard drive never gets a chance to spin down, wasting valuable power. Laptop mode helps by making disk write activity "bursty", so that only reads of uncached data result in a disk spinup.

To enable Laptop Mode in Ubuntu you'll have to install the package laptop-mode-tools:

sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

It has pretty good default settinga, but you can change them by editing the file /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf:

sudo vim /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf