Acquiring Satellites..

If you have a laptop or a newer desktop running Ubuntu there is a good chance that your computer is scaling the processor speed automatically. In most cases the OnDemand setting it chooses works just fine but it’s nice to have an easy way to manually control the scaling.

Here are the two biggest reasons I can think of that you may want to force the processor to a specific speed:

1. To squeeze every last bit of battery life possible.

2. Processes with a nice setting too high will not cause the processor to scale it’s speed up

Luckily getting manual control is pretty easy. First you need to add the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor to your panel. If you’ve never done this before just right click on the panel and choose add to panel then drag the icon for the monitor over to the panel. If it will not let you add the monitor your computer does not support CPU frequency scaling. Now you can see what’s going on with your processor, next we’ll change things so you can control it. (Some dual core systems allow independent control of the frequency scaling for each core. In this case you’ll need to add another copy of the scaling monitor for each core and in the preferences change each so it monitors a different core.)

Now open a terminal window and use the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

The dialog is pretty simple, just select Yes to allow the cpu-freq-selector to be installed with SUID root. Now once that finished you should be able to left click on the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor and choose what speed/setting you want your processor to run under.

The settings don’t persist through a reboot so you’ll have to set each time, it defaults the the very sane OnDemand though. You should also be careful of heat issues caused by forcing the processor to full speed since some laptops don’t deal well being run full out for any length of time.