I have recently had the great pleasure of acquiring a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop.
Obviously, it came pre-installed with UnmentionableOS, but once the rubble and dust cleared, a sizable chunk had been blown away for Slackware, that old King of OS'es - which is now on board, running the show.
Now, I know that the hardware system supports throttling with ACPI. Can anyone tell me how this works?
Also, there is no power management here that works. Any pointers? Kernel recompile? I have done chmod +x on rc.acpid.

When I installed Slackware on my HP laptop I had to recompile the kernel to enable the ACPI features. The stock kernel doesn't include them by default. It's been my experience that much of the power saving is done manually:

1) use hdparm to adjust the hard drive
2) pay attention to screen brightness and activity. use a simple (non-gl) screensaver and enable DPMS in your xorg.conf so the screen will blank after x number of minutes.
3) pay attention to resource usage. you might setup a lightweight wm to use when you're running on battery power

I'll have a look at compiling the kernel. It is a good idea and something I intended to do anyway.
I am running Xfce, so it shouldn't be too demanding as it is. I might just change to Fluxbox, but I suspect that Xfce isn't too hard on the battery. I always adjust the background lighting to go easy on it.
Does anyone here know where the Xfce battery indicator panel thingie gets the data from?

Right, XFCE should be easy on the resources. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure all the battery monitor programs get the data from /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1.

Thank you - I was used to using APM on my other, older laptop. So I am used to
cat /proc/apm
- ACPI is a bit more complex, it seems.

Throttling works fine. You'll need to recompile the kernel, and I'd suggest a 2.6 series, with support for all of the governors. You can choose which governor is the default at kernel compile time, too.

Also, you'll want to install cpufreqd. That'll pay attention to the power status, and switch governors according to rules you set. I've got mine set to OnDemand when powered, keeping the laptop at 498MHz instead of the 1.2GHz that it's rated for, because it runs cooler and quieter. (doesn't even need the CPU cooling fan). When I'm watching movies or playing games, it jumps up to the 1.2GHz.

When I unplug it, I've got the CPU hard throttled at 498MHz, to maximize battery life.


Also... look into mpd for your mp3/ogg player. It runs as a daemon and you don't need to keep a GUI open while it's playing. Works great for me on random play, and doesn't use nearly as many clock cycles as drawing a GUI does. I've got launchers in XFCE which run the mpc (command-line client) commands to skip to previous, rewind, start, stop, and pause, and that's all I really need for mpd.

Pat does provide the bareacpi kernel in 2.4.x. It is in the kernels directory. Just in case you don't want to build your own.

I am having problems with configuring (running ./configure) while installing cpufreqd. I am told:
'undefined reference to rpl_malloc'
I have heard of this before, but I am not sure how to go about it.

version 1.2.3 of cpufreqd is available as a Slackware binary package here:

http://www.linuxpackages.net/search_...&name=cpu&ver=

Might be worth a try if you have trouble building it from source.