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I've been working on a program called powermgr. It's a daemon written |
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in Perl that can control many power management functions on Linux, |
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including CPU frequency and/or governor, screen brightness, laptop mode, |
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fan speed, wireless power management, as well as runlevel and services, |
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based on the state of the system. |
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|
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It works on the idea of a Profile that describes the settings for each |
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component (in a device-independent way; for example, CPU speed is a |
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percentage [0% = min speed, 100% = max speed] rather than a raw speed) |
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and can be selected as a whole. It uses Rules to specify when a Profile |
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should be selected. For example, you can have a "fast" Profile that |
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turns the CPU speed up and turns off laptop mode, and activate it when |
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the ac adapter is plugged in or when the programs make, gcc, or javac |
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are running. |
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|
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It has support for standard ACPI as well as Asus, Dell, IBM, OmniBook, |
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and Toshiba extensions, and also interfaces with other things like |
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hddtemp and laptop_mode. It comes with a default configuration file |
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that is quite thorough and should do a decent job, and a simple init |
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script. |
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|
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A test I ran suggests that powermgr can increase battery life by 50% to |
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100%. (Tested between "performance" and "powersave" modes on a Centrino |
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laptop; intermmediate results are available on the website; YMMV). It's |
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worked well for me. |
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|
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My goal for powermgr is to get to the point where you can install it, |
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leave the default configuration file in place, start the daemon, and |
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have it act like Windows and automatically throttle things up and down. |
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I know there are ACPI shell scripts to do this, but powermgr is a more |
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modular and extensible approach, and also supports a much wider variety |
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of hardware. |
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|
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You can find powermgr at http://powermgr.sourceforge.net/. It's only on |
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version 0.0.8 right now, but it's already quite featureful and I've |
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weeded out all of the big bugs I can find. I'd appreciate any feedback |
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you can give. (Just reply to this message, or leave me a note on |
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SourceForge in the bug tracker). |
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|
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Thanks, |
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|
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Thomas Tuttle |
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