Battery life under Linux has always been worse that Windows in every machine I have ever owned. So I set out to find out what I could do on my new Samsung Princeton to stretch the battery as far as possible while still leaving me a machine I could use for programming. This blog is part one or a two part blog series on what I found and the optimizations I made. My laptop now gets over 8 hours of battery life which is significantly better than the 4-5 hours I was previously getting.

Ubuntu 11.10 has been installed on my Samsung Chronos 7 since the day I bought it.  After finally figuring out how to get the hybrid graphics to behave, I turned my attention towards getting the touchpad to work correctly.  Under the stock kernel the touchpad, which is reported as an Elantech v4, does not show in Gnome3 as a touchpad and is fairly unusable.  There is no multi-finger support and I would constantly hit the mouse while I was typing.  I would basically disable the internal mouse any time I was in Linux and just use an external mouse.  This is fine when I am at my desk, but...

I recently purchased an Intel 320 series 120GB SSD hard drive for my Samsung Princeton ultrabook.  The drive was intended to replace my Corsair Force3 SSD that I could never get to work with the laptop.  The Force3 was too large for the laptop and always caused issues with the wireless as soon as the drive was installed.  I tried multiple things to get it to work including taking it apart to make it smaller and making custom carriers for the SSD.  It didn’t seem to matter what I did, the second I installed the Force3 I would immediately get wireless issue.  It would take ages for my laptop...

I always have a hard time finding the APN list I should be using for any AT&T “4g” phone, so I thought I would post them here for easier reference. These came from the XDA forums and I take not responsibility for them. I’m just sharing them for all. I believe you need all 4 of them and you should set the AT&T US HSDPA to the default one in your APN manager.

One of the project I work on uses Symfony 1.4.  I had a client contact me today saying that when they uploaded transparent png files, the resized files were no longer transparent, instead had a black background.  I thought this was strange and knew it had to be something with resizing of the images using sfThumbnail.  The original images were fine, it was only the resized images that no longer had their transparency. After doing some google searching I came across a number of people with the same issue.  I eventually was led to this...