I am really really confused about the power management tools available for Linux: I have Arch Linux with XFCE on my laptop.
The guides on the the Arch Linux wiki list
acpi
acpid
pm-utils
cpufreq
laptop-mode-tools
to manage power, suspension, disks and CPU, WiFi, etc.
But I can't understand what the relationships between them are. Apparently they don't require each other (dependencies are listed as optional) but it's not clear to me what this implies: do they work together doing different things or are they alternative to each others or conflict with each other or what?
At the moment I only have pm-utils
(+upower
) installed. Do I also need acpi
and/or acpid
? And what about laptop-mode-tools
: is this kind of supervisor of all the other tools? If so, should I configure only laptop-mode-tools
or also each of the other tools separately? How do they interact with lm-sensors
and cpufreq
?
In addition to this, there is XFCE Power Manager, which seems to be unrelated to any of the above tools, as it works even if they are not installed. So my question is again, if I install the others will they conflict with XFCE Power Manager? And what about the power management options included in Xscreensaver
? Do they conflict or do they override the settings in XFCE Power Manager (or acpi
or pm-utils
)?
All I want to do really is to have an efficient use of energy:
- be able to go to standby/suspension
- don't have the fan running all the time
- don't overheat/damage the CPU and the hard drive
- turn off WiFi when in standby/suspension
- et cetera