Optimizing laptop battery life with AcpiTool and PowerTOP
Far from the next power outlet, many users look anxiously at their laptop's battery charge state. Although modern hardware relies on several tricks to save power, whether or not they actually work often depends on your hardware.
One option available to Linux users is managing power through the ACPI kernel modules (see the box titled "The ACPI Dilemma"). Recent machines also let you configure many components on the fly to reduce energy consumption. The small command-line programs AcpiTool and PowerTOP can help you keep track of your power demands and keep your laptop from shutting down when you really need it.
Specifics
AcpiTool resides in the repositories of virtually all the major distributions, and you can install it conveniently from there via the respective package manager. If it is missing from your choice of distribution, you can quite easily build the tool from the source code [2]. After installation, call acpitool in a terminal window. The software works in userspace, so you do not need root privileges (Figure 1). The program parses the contents of the /proc/acpi directory and converts it to a legible format.
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