I reinstalled both Slackware 12.1 and Debian Etch on my IBM ThinkPad T40 last night. All went well with the installations, and so far, everything seems to be working as expected, with one exception.

I've been fiddling around with the Debian install most so far (because it's new a shiny to me! ) and noticed that flash video performance was terrible compared with flash in Slackware. I checked my xorg settings, and glxgears showed me comparable output to that in Slackware, so all seemed well.

I noticed that when I added the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor to the Gnome taskbar, I get an error telling me my CPU won't scale its frequency, and after clicking OK, I get a monitor which displays my CPU frequency as 598MHz. I've seen this before, so I tried stressing the CPU with dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null, and CPU usage shot up to 99% for dd, but the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo showed CPU frequency was unchanged, at 598.080MHz.

I've googled around for why this might be, but all I've found are a lot of threads on how to scale your CPU frequency. This one seemed promising, but the diskdrake project seems to have vanished? There's no mention of it for Debian in Synaptic anyway.

Is there something simple I've overlooked? I haven't had a chance to check the corresponding output from Slackware (I'm at work connecting through ssh and a vnc session at the moment), but can do when I get home.

All thoughts welcome.

Check for what scaling governor is active:
it should read: ondemand
or "userspace" - in that case I believe you need additional software - whereas "ondemand" just works (for me, that is)

You may have to load the kernel-module to be able to use this by echoing:
I don't know the place where this is configured permanently in Debian - should this work at all.

HTH