[ltp] [W510] decreasing power use, increasing battery life: screen and lid issues

[Tom Roche]

Can I get advice on ways to improve a Thinkpad W510's battery life when
running debian? I'd especially like to improve its power management,
e.g.,

* allowing screen brightness control via Fn-Home/Fn-End

* making the close-lid event just turn off the screen, instead of
  sleeping the box (i.e., suspending to RAM)

I recently got a W510 on closeout (pretty good price). I installed LMDE
(a testing/wheezy-based distro), but am only getting slightly more than
2 hours use from a fully-charged battery. This is usually plenty, but
this week I'm traveling at a conference where the meeting rooms seem to
have no accessible power outlets :-(

One major problem seems to be screen power management: the screen is
always on full brightness, and cannot be reduced by Fn-End.

Another major problem is, closing the lid does not (solely) turn off the
screen: instead, it sleeps the box. This means I am sometimes forced to
keep the lid up and screen on when not necessary. Note I have made the
appropriate change in the gnome-power-manager UI, but the behavior of
the box does not change.

I thought I could fix at least the first problem by switching the video
driver from nouveau to nvidia proprietary, but that breaks boot, as
described here

http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/pipermail/linux-thinkpad/2012-December/051131.html

So I'd appreciate other suggestions (as well as advice regarding ways to
roll back the nvidia install!)

TIA, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche@pobox.com>