Laptop Power Management, Ubuntu v7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

skill level: intermediate
Your laptop probably scales processor speed just fine.
I travel many hours by plane and much prefer to force most efficient use of my laptop's battery life. This method is very easy to switch between On Demand / Power Save settings

• Add the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor to your panel
• Right click on the panel and choose add to panel then drag the icon for the monitor over to the panel
• If it will not let you add the monitor your computer does not support CPU frequency scaling
• Now you can see what’s going on with your processor, next we’ll change things so you can control it
• Some dual core systems allow independent control of the frequency scaling for each core
• Add another copy of the scaling monitor for each core and in the preferences change each so it monitors a different core
• Now open a terminal window:
• $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets
• follow the dialog of the command and "Yes" for SUID control
• Now you should be able to left click on the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor and choose what speed/setting you want your processor to run under.

After a reboot it will default to On Demand. You will have to manually set these to Power Save each time. NEVER set your processor speed to MAX! Only choose On Demand or Power Save.


Comments:
Daniel said... Most kernel governors are broken. Only use ondemand.