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All you have to do on a debian based system for cpu-freq to work is run 'dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets' or on Ubuntu 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets' then it'll explain why it's not available in the first place, and give you a warning about it running SUID, then once you enable it, just add the CPU Frequency Scaling applet to your panel and it works. At least it does for both my AMD64 Desktop and my Intel Centrino Laptop. I did notice that Fedora 7 has this enabled by default.
CPU frequency scaling is handled by default. We don't support manual overriding out of the box because:
a) it's difficult to do in a way that doesn't allow denial of service, and
b) the kernel generally knows better than you, especially now that the ondemand governor is well tuned.
The only machines where it won't work automatically are Celerons (which don't support voltage scaling, so there's little point in frequency scaling) and some older Pentium 4s (which have similar issues, with the addition of extra latency to make the experience even worse). If you're having problems with another chip, please do file a bug.
Yeah, that's basically what I said
Fedora 7 has manual override on by default, under Debian and Ubuntu you have to reconfigure the gnome-applets to set SUID for manual override and it does give the appropriate warning.
Sometimes I like to use it when I'm watching a movie on my laptop while using my battery so that it doesn't use it all up, since usually to make smooth DVD playback, the CPU tries to jack itself up to maximum, even though the 798Mhz that it runs as the slowest speed works. Though I have found that under Windows XP, there was a slower speed that the CPU could clock itself too, and I had it working under Linux as well at one point, but I had to modify some files which I can't recall at the moment.




Member since:
2007-09-03
Did you try this yet ? You could have a better battery life.
But since we are in this subject, the support for cpu_freq scalling was almost like giving birth to an elephant. Is it better ?