Squeeze More Battery Life from Your Linux Netbook with Jupiter

Productivity Sauce

One of the major selling points of Eee PC netbooks is their impressive battery life which is achieved by utilizing the Asus Super Hybrid Engine (SHE) technology. While it's designed to work under Windows, you can take advantage of this technology if you're running a Linux distro on your Eee PC, courtesy of the Jupiter utility. Although this tool is designed primarily for Eee PC netbooks, it works well on pretty much any notebook. So if you want to squeeze as much battery life from your machine as you can, Jupiter is worth a try.

Jupiter's Web site provides DEB and RPM binary packages, so you can easily install the utility on any Linux distro that uses these package formats. If you are installing Jupiter on an Eee PC, you need to install two packages: jupiter and jupiter-support-eee. On any other notebook or netbook, the jupiter package would suffice. Once up and running, Jupiter places a lightning bolt icon in the tray menu. Using the icon, you can quickly switch between different performance modes. Besides that, Jupiter lets you control other aspects of your netbook: you can enable and disable WiFi, Bluetooth, and touchpad (provided Jupiter detects these devices), select a different screen resolution, and switch between internal and external displays.

By default, Jupiter doesn't support keyboard shortcuts, but you can easily add them manually using scripts installed with the utility. The easiest way to do this on Ubuntu is to use the Ubuntu Tweak tool. To create a keyboard shortcut that cycles through the available performance modes, launch Ubuntu Tweak and switch to the Personal | Shortcut Commands section. Select an empty command entry, enter the sudo /usr/lib/jupiter/scripts/cpu-control command in the Command field, specify the desired keyboard shortcut in the Key field, and you're done. You can find a list of supported commands you can use with keyboard shortcuts on the project's Web site.

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