Since I’m trying out Arch Linux on a laptop I figured it would be a good idea to follow their recommendations for laptops and power management. I should start by pointing out that there are obviously quite a few different customization you can do for a laptop and a lot of it depends on your hardware. What I’ve chosen to do below is pretty much the bare minimum because this laptop tends to be plugged in the whole time anyway. If you’re planning on using your laptop in a more portable way then I would suggest looking through the whole Laptop page and deciding which tweaks make sense for you.
First thing I had to do was install the acpi package to provide access to power management feature and battery information:
pacman -S acpi
This should also allow X11 to load the screen brightness module on boot. But again if that doesn’t work I’m not too worried – this laptop will probably be plugged in anyway.
Next I wanted to install some hard drive shock detection and protection packages. Because this laptop is a Lenovo I installed the following two:
pacman -S tp_smapi hdapsd
I also went ahead and installed the xfce4-hdaps package from the AUR which should make configuring this a bit easier.
For things like CPU scaling I’m simply leaving it to the default kernel module. And yeah that’s pretty much it. Like I said my configure is pretty bare bones so if you’re following my steps YMMV.
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