[Discuss] PowerTop & Conky, how to combine?

[Carlos R. Mafra]

BasaBuru wrote:
> El Tuesday 06 November 2007 16:58:46 Arjan van de Ven escribió:
> 
>> many desktop environments, including gnome, kde and xfce, have their
>> own power meter / battery monitor tool.... I would expect that you
>> already have one of these in your system..
> 
> I'm finding for one app what show the power usage, like powertop "Power usage 
> (5 minute ACPI estimate) : 21.3 W (1.9 hours left)"
> 
> I'm look for in Debian and Net........ i can't find one.

I had this problem also, and I didn't want to use kde or gnome. So I modified
the wmlaptop app to show the power usage of my laptop (also CPU temperature, 
CPU frequency, cpuload, battery % etc).

First I had to modify wmlaptop to use the ondemand cpu governor, and then I
copied the relevant powertop source code regarding the power usage into
wmlaptop.

You can check how wmlaptop looks with my modifications here:

While battery is charging the power usage is 'green':
http://www.ift.unesp.br/users/crmafra/wmlaptop_ondemand1.png

The power usage is written in red when battery is discharging:
http://www.ift.unesp.br/users/crmafra/wmlaptop_ondemand2.png

You can download this modified wmlaptop (version 1.5) there too.

Note that my modified wmlaptop generates a few wakeups, because
it polls the cpu frequency and all that. 

I really would like to know if there is a kernel mechanism which  
would notify some application whether the cpu frequency changed.
I tried to use dnotify to check the scaling_cur_freq file in /sys,
but that didn't work (and I think that doesn't make sense :-))

Bye,
Carlos