Last Updated on May 28, 2022
This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For details of all tools in this series, please visit Excellent Ways to Manage Your System – Essential System Tools.
If you use Linux on a notebook, TLP is for you. It saves laptop battery power with a wide variety of features. There’s processor frequency scaling, Wifi power saving, hard disk advanced power management, GPU power management and much more.
TLP is free and open source software.
Installation
I normally compile software for testing purposes, rather than rely on any distribution specific package available.
Installing TLP depends on your distro. There are packages available for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Ubuntu and other distributions. It’s such a useful utility that almost every major Linux distributions include TLP in their repositories.
As TLP is available as a Community package in Arch, I decided not to compile the source, but install it with the command.
tlp-rdw is the radio device wizard. For example, it supports ThinkPad Dock Basic/Pro for dock/undock events. I’d recommend installing it together with TLP.
TLP will start automatically at the next system restart, or you can manually start it with the command
You can check that TLP is working with the command:
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary