Power Manager for Kubuntu

I'm looking for a power manager for Linux that controls CPU throttling, LCD brightness, and perhaps HD activity, as the Power Manager program that came with Kubuntu is woefully inadequate for my needs as a laptop user. Thanks for the advice.

PS: what do you guys know about (k)ubuntu's standby/hibernation functionality? Are they both working? I am pleased to say that my standby function works, but I haven't tried hibernation yet.

 

Well, I don't know of a program that does those things. I know how to deal with them at the command line, but I suppose that's not interesting/cool/feasible for you. So in other words, you'll have to find the program you are looking for, and I can't be sure it even exists.

Kubuntu should do a lot of power management on its own - like CPU throttling and HD control. You can install third party programs that run as processes in the background to monitor certain things like temperature and disk spinups.

On another note, does your keyboard shortcut for brightness not work by default? I hear some Sony notebooks have trouble under Debian (and Debian based distros) with simple brightness control. I know with my Acer and Dell notebooks, Ubuntu recognizes the keyboard configuration -> and if not, you can adjust that in System settings.

 

Screen brightness works, but I am hoping for a program similar to Toshiba's Power Management, where you make individual power schemes based on what you are doing, such as intensive processing (for gaming) or low power consumption for downloading things overnight.

Btw, how do you control a P4's clock speed in Kubuntu? Mine always seems to be on 1800MHz.

 

I don't think a P4 will throttle... make sure you have power management enabled, and speedstep included in your modules or in the kernel.

I think that you can directly control CPU speeds by doing something like:

"sudo echo 1000 > /proc/cpu/frequency"

1800 may also be as low as your P4 goes. It will probably ramp up when you need it. Start something like glxgears, and then look at your CPU speed.

 

I think 1.8 is about as low as that P4 will go. Generally speaking, Intel Speedstep will decrease the speed by ~1/2. My 2.16 Core Duo will go down to 1.0 per core, and my old P4 2.0 would go down to ~1.0. Take into account that your P4 may be HT, and I think 1.8 is about right. Besides, the fact that it goes to 1.8 at some point is evidence that ACPI is working correctly.

 

For CPU throttling, I use the 'ondemand' scaling governor that's part of the kernel. All you have to do is execute the following command on startup:

Code:

# echo 'ondemand' >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

In Gentoo, cpufrequtils handles this the "Gentoo way", but in reality the above is all it does. I'm not sure of the "Debian way" that Ubuntu would be using or I'd post that.

You can look around inside that directory (sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/) too and see how everything works (look at the files in that directory). The cpuinfo_* files will tell you about the detected cpu/kernel capabilities.

Good luck!

 

I'm actually trying to get it to scale between 1.8 and 3GHz... the problem is that I never see it move from 1.8.

 

Like I said, start up glxgears or just write a script that just adds a number, then subtracts it back off infinitely, start it running, and see what happens to your CPU speed. I'll bet you're already running it.

And you can always type

Code:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

in at the command line and see what your current scaling governor is.

 

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

the result: ondemand

That answer is good enough for me. Still, can anyone recommend a good power manager?

 

Since you're using Kubuntu, you could also use kima to display temperatures as well as CPU clock speed. Personally I use that and gkrellm to always see what's going on inside my laptop. A lot of KDE people favor using various superkaramba themes also, but I still like the compactness that gkrellm offers.

I haven't really looked for anything that dims the screen automatically - just stuff like display blanking and power. Also, I'm not sure what powering off the harddrive would do as there is always something going on with the disk anyway - it'd never reach whatever timeout period I had set. That said, you may want to look into the mount option noatime attribute to save disk activity and even gain a little performance. Even with the noatime mount option, however, my drive is usually doing something every few seconds.