I’ve seen a lot of stuff about how to use powertop to get info on your current setup but nothing on how to actually make changes that improve your power. From what I can tell, it’s just a command line tool that spits out information on what’s using power. How do I use that to then turn off things or change their settings to use less power?
There is a tab for tunables on the far end of powertop. This screenshot is from the version in 12.2. Though I think such tunables are temporary (until reboot?). You might want to look into how to start them permanently if that is what you desire.
http://paste.opensuse.org/images/36877819.png
When I try to run “powertop --calibrate”, I get the error:
No protocol specified /usr/bin/xset: unable to open display ":0"
What causes this?
You probably run that command as root (that is one reason I always advocate to post also the prompt and the command bwtween the CODE tags, then we can see what yoy did in what working directoryy as which user). And the command tries to open a window (mark that I do not know powergate, I only interprete the error message). Thwe environment says to open it on display :0, but that display is not owned by user root, but ny another user (the one you loged in into the GUI with) and that user did noy allow others (including root) to open windows at will onhis desktop.
Again thgere is missing information here as so often. No openSUSE version, no desktop. :disapointed:
When it is KDE, you should use kdesu to start a program as root that wants to open windows on your display surface. kdesu will make the needed alllowances.
Thank you. I apologize for my lack of info. I had watched a tutorial video and they run it as root and get no issues, but they also were not on openSUSE.
My Info:
openSUSE 12.2
KDE 4.8.5
Kernel: 3.4.11 (64bit)
8GB RAM (6.5GB free)
Intel i5 1.7 quad core
I tried running it via KDESU, but when I do all that happens is it turns the screen black and then after nothing happened, I touched the mousepad and discovered the command simply finished with no output despite me running it with the “–debug” command. It went like this:
myuser:~>kdesu /usr/sbin/powertop --calibrate --debug
myuser:~>
That’s it. No output! What am I doing wrong?
Well, kdesu is designed to be used from the “execute command” item from the Kmenu. Not from the terminal. I do not know what it does when run from a terminal.
Further I have no idea about the powertop program, I only explained what the error message means. And it seems that you do not get that error and that something happens to your desktop now instead.
And about that root usage. I did not imply that powertop should not be run as root (though one must of courss allways distrust people who show that they do it, specialy on the Internet), but you did not tel you did. You must NOT assume that people here, maybe at the other side of the globe do see or autmagicaly know what you are doing. Nor ,ust you assume that they studied the Internet pages you did. You should explain everything.
I apologize if this sounds rude (don’t mean it that way) but is there anyone here who has run “powertop --calibrate” on opensuse who can tell me how to get it to work?
Doesn’t sound rude at all to me. After all that is why you started this thread at all.
Only thing is that you posted an error message which is quite common (not powertop dependent, valid for all programs that want to open a window on a display in a situaltion where the owner of that display did not allow this) and which I tried to explain in the hope that that might help at least one step further.
We now both hope that there is somebody with powertop knowledge around on the forums (btw, it might not help that you made a typo in the thread title, shall I edit that r into it?)
Please do!
And I may have found the answer!
It appears there was a bug in powertop 2.0:
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/powertop/2012-May/000035.html
Upgrading to 2.2 appears to fix the problem (uninstall powertop 2.0 first):
myuser:~>wget download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/powertop-2.2-1.1.x86_64.rpm
myuser:~>sudo rpm -i powertop*