PowerTop For Linux

PowerTop is a completely free and open source command-line software project that has been created from the ground up to be used for detecting which GNU/Linux programs and kernel tunables are the biggest power and battery consumers.

Are you wondering why your laptop battery drains so fast, or you want a powerful tool to just diagnose issues with power management and power consumption on your computer? PowerTop can help you, by making your computer to use the least amount of power without hassle.

The software offers various command-line, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘powertop --help’ command after installing it using the instructions provided by Softpedia in the next section. The usage message is also displayed with the same command.

Among its command-line options, we can mention the ability to generate CSV and HTML reports, support for suppressing stderr output, the ability to generate a report for a specific number of seconds, as well as the ability to specify a file to execute for workload.

You can use command-line options to run PowerTop in calibration or debug mode, to set all tunable options to their good settings, to use an Extech Power Analyzer device for measurements, and to specify the number of times to run each test.

In case your Linux kernel-based operating system does not have a binary package for the PowerTop utility in its software repositories, you can always download the latest source package from Softpedia and install the software using the following instructions.

Download the TAR archive and save it on your Home directory. Use your favorite archive manager utility to extract the archive, open a Terminal app, and go to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file.

In the terminal window, type the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, then, after a successful compilation process, type the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user or the ‘make install’ command as root to install it PowerTop system wide.