Fedora Linux

Power Management

When you’re on the go, you have to carry your power with you. Notebook power management therefore receives a lot more attention than desktop power management, even though attention to these issues on the desktop can result in significant savings in electrical costs, system wear, and heat production.

For many years, power-management interfaces have been proprietary and required custom software supplied by the hardware vendor in order to function well (even when they purportedly adhered to industry standards). The situation is slowly improving, and Fedora contains good tools for power management on well-behaved systems.

How Do I Do That?

Fedora uses the Advanced Configuation and Power Interface (ACPI) specification to monitor and manage the current power configuration. This approach requires support from the motherboard and CPU as well as the operating system; fortunately, most systems built in the last decade have some level of ACPI support, though many BIOS implementations are nonstandard.

Using gnome-power-manager to conserve power

Fedora’s main power-management tool is gnome-power-manager. You can access the gnome-power-manager configuration window using the menu option System→Preferences→More Preferences→Power Management.

Tip

Fedora Core does not include the KDE ACPI modules. However, you can use gnome-power-manager in KDE by starting it manually: press Alt-F2 or open a terminal, and type:

$ gnome-power-manager

A second power-management icon will appear in the ...