Intel Atom Powertop System Monitoring Application

The Ubuntu repos have Intel powertop software. The software is a quick terminal based interface providing information about your computers power consumption. The software is designed to report on Atom based CPUs.

sudo apt-get install powertop

Run with:

sudo powertop

Press “w” when the softwasre tells you and your system will self optimize a bit. It recommends operating your CPUs on dynamic frequency mode, but when on battery power its obviously better to fix the frequency at the lowest value. Also reducing the brightness of your screen will substantially reduce power consumption.

Gnome Panel frequency Scaling Applet

By default the Gnome frequency scaling applet does not vary the frequency of the CPU. If your computer supports frequency scaling then the gnome panel applet can server quite useful. The only requirement is to reconfigure the applet to operate with root permissions:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets