Building & Installing PowerTOP ------------------------------ just type make make install Build dependencies ------------------ PowerTOP uses C++, and expects g++ and libstdc++ to be functional in addition to that, it needs the following components: pciutils-devel ncurses-devel zlib-devel libnl-devel and a functional glibc/pthreads development environment Outputting a report ------------------- When invoking PowerTOP without arguments, it goes into interactive mode. However, for reporting bugs etc there is a special reporting mode: powertop --html which will create a "powertop.html" file which is static and can be sent to others to help diagnose power issues. Calibrating & Power Numbers --------------------------- PowerTOP will, when running on battery, track your power consumption as well as your activity on the system. Once there are sufficient such measurements, PowerTOP can start to report power estimates for various activities. You can help get this estimation more accurate by running a calibration cycle: powertop --calibrate at least once; this will cycle through various display brightness levels (including "off") as well as USB device activities and some other workloads. Code from other open source projects ------------------------------------ PowerTOP contains some code from other open source projects; we'd like to thank the authors of those projects for their work. Specifically PowerTOP contains code from nl80211 userspace tool - Copyright 2007, 2008 Johannes Berg Extech Power Analyzer / Datalogger support ------------------------------------------ I use, and our analysis teams use, the Extech Power Analyzer/Datalogger (model number 380803) quite a lot, and PowerTOP supports using this device over the serial cable. Just pass the device node on the command line like this powertop --extech=/dev/ttyUSB0 (where ttyUSB0 is the devicenode of the serial-to-usb adapter on my system)