If you are an ‘OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 KDE‘ user with a laptop and who like me, is not happy with the power consumption readings, and looking for a way to improve (reduce) it, then this short article is for you.
In GNU/Linux I primarily use two utilities (you should not use both simultaneously) for reducing the power consumption. One is called ‘TLP’, and the other is called ‘Laptop-Mode-Tools’. Both are pretty good tools, although ‘Laptop-Mode-Tools’ is the older one (still actively developed), due to its simplicity, these days I prefer ‘TLP’.
However, ‘TLP’ is not yet available for ‘OpenMandriva…’ users but ‘Laptop-Mode-Tools’ is, and that is what I will be using here. The installation is pretty simple, you can use either the GUI or the command-line, but I will be using the command-line method since it is really easy.
Step 1: Open a terminal window (if you do not know how to do that, then search for ‘konsole’ in start-menu) and enter the below command:
sudo urpmi laptop-mode-tools
When asked, enter your user password (I am assuming that you are currently logged in through the user that you created during the installation, otherwise you might not have administrative privileges) and then simply type ‘y’ to confirm the installation.
Step 2: Once the installation finishes, you can either reboot the computer or start its service for the changes to apply. If you decided not to reboot, then enter the below command into the terminal for starting the ‘Laptop-Mode-Tools’ service/daemon:
sudo service laptop-mode start
That is it!.
However, ‘Laptop-Mode-Tools’ has this feature which automatically suspends USB devices for saving power. This however, sometimes makes devices such as USB mice to get frozen and stop working. As a fix, you can ‘blacklist’ your USB mouse in ‘Laptop-Mode-Tools’ and it will disable the auto-suspension. I have written an article concerning that a while ago for Ubuntu user, but I manually checked it and can conform that the same steps are working in ‘OpenMandriva…’ as well.
So if you too experience similar issues after installing ‘Laptop-Mode-Tools’ (or concerning any other USB device), then please follow the instructions laid out here.