power management and power plan in ubuntu 10.10

[Chogan]

i recently installed ubuntu 10.10 on my laptop (hp pavilion dv2500). it's good but when you installed an OS on a laptop you need "power plan" options (such as power saver, balanced, high performance etc.) and ubuntu 10.10 doesn't have this.
does ubuntu have some useful features such as "power plan" for laptops? i read some where that openSuse has this feature.

[Joe of loath]

You can set different behaviour for when the laptop is plugged in, and when it is not.

The power plans are actually mis-named, 'Performance' just makes the screen brighter, and disables suspend on idle. 'Power saving' just turns the screen off after 5 minutes, and suspends the PC after 15 or so.

You can also install laptop-mode-tools and cpufreq (if your CPU supports changing the frequency) for extra power saving, and these can be enabled on battery and disabled on AC.

[mastablasta]

click on batery icon and select properties to modify your power management and "plans".

Strangely enough i just installed Xubuntu desktop package (on top of Ubuntu 10.04) to have a go with XFCE and this caused 2 batery icons to show up. so now i can compare both. I think Xubuntu has it done better regarding management options and how easy it is to find what you need, yet Gnome can give more details on power consumtion i believe.

this is to be expected since gnome is set up to have as little options as possibel in GUI to be more user frienldy. that is not to say that options don't exist.

for good and really lots of GUI options you would have to take a look at KDE.