I would like to try klaptop instead of kpowersave. Under kpowersave, the fan nearly always on. Also, kpowersave seems to interfere with screen brightness controls. However, I cannot get klaptop to show up in the system tray.

Here are the steps I took:

1. I stopped kpowersave

2. I went to KDE control -> Power control -> Laptop Battery -> ACPI Config and clicked Setup Helper Application, entered the root password, and the checkboxes become up active.

3. Enabled standby, suspend, hibernate, performance profiles and CPU trottling, then went through all tabs and chose performance profile Ondemand, and CPU trottling at 00%.

4. Next I went to the Battery tab, checked all boxes, then clicked the "Start battery Monitor" button. Nothing happened.

5. Logout, then Login -> No klaptop icon in the system tray.

6. Went back to the KDE control center, and disabled performance profiles and CPU trottling, in case these settings interfere with kpowersave (which should not be running anyway!)

7. Logout, then Login. Nothing again.

I did noticed that the fan now takes short pauses, but what on earth controls it??? Tried ps -ef |grep klaptop, and it shows nothing at all. laptop-mode in Services is checked out to start on boot, but its status is "Stopped".

Can somebody explain what am I missing? Thanks

Edit: PS: I just checked KDE service Manager -> Load on-demand Services -> Laptop battery monitor is not running

I found that on the cooker mailing list. http://archives.mandrivalinux.com/cooker/2...05/msg03328.php
Also check this, although it is rather old. Maybe it lists one thing that you missed when wheeling and dealing with both apps: http://dkukawka.blogspot.com/2006/03/kpowe...r-mandriva.html

Hope it helps a bit.

Thanks, arctic. I should admit, these links confused me even more.

1. So, Mandriva says goodbye to klaptop but still packages it as a part of KDE???

2. The old post explains that powersave (and its frontend kpowersave) is the replacement to cpufreq, and cpufreq daemon should not be used. Hold on, but on my machine, there is no service named powersave in /etc/init.d. Instead I have service called cpufreq and the service is running!

Am I only one with these questions? I remember spending quite a bit of time sorting power management on my previous laptop (Mandrake 9.2). Four years passed and the mess is still there. Well done Mandriva!

Welcome to the club.

Honored

Seriously, is there a documentation on editing/optimizing power usage and speedstepping policies for Mandriva? I presume there must a better way for that than selecting between Powersave and Performance. What are those policies anyway? If I wanted this level of flexibility, I would continue using Windows