tech

In the previous article I talked about external meters and pmda-denki. Now lets see how much power certain hardware components need. Pmda-denki usage pmda-denki is now in PCP upstream. One can use the code from there, via packages build regularly, or wait for the next PCP release to make it into the Linux distros. With that done, and pmda-denki being installed, metrics regarding electrical power are available. On laptops where pmda-denki can access both sources: As per ‘pmrep . [Read More]

TL’DR With a Linux laptop, you can quite accurately measure the systems current overall power consumption while on battery. This allows to compare if the new version of your software uses more power than the old one. On Intel/AMD systems, power consumption of cpu’s can be measured with RAPL - good enough to compare cpu workloads. You can read these metrics directly from sysfs and do some simple computations, or [Read More]

So, having seen Norbert and @codewiz mentioning Plasma frequently, I decided to give it a try. My desktop box is Fedora33, which comes with a quite current version of Plasma. Some years ago, I tried gnome - but Gnomes “let’s make it as simple as possible, leave buttons out”-strategy does not stick well with me. I don’t want a dumbed down window manager. I use WindowMaker since dozends of years. It’s nice and lean, but does not seem to have a future with Wayland. [Read More]