LFS - Powertop & acpi

Powertop is a system which is supposed to help you save battery life on a portable PC by identifying areas to optimise. Powertop requires lspci (optional) which in turn wants 'which', so:

wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/which/which-2.20.tar.gz
tar -xzvf which-2.20.tar.gz
cd which-2.20
./configure --prefix=/usr &&
make
make install
cd ..
rm -rvf which-2.20

wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/utils/pciutils/pciutils-3.1.7.tar.bz2
tar -xjvf pciutils-3.1.7.tar.bz2
cd pciutils-3.1.7
make PREFIX=/usr ZLIB=no
make PREFIX=/usr install
make PREFIX=/usr install-lib
update-pciids
cd ..
rm -rvf pciutils-3.1.7

wget http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/download/powertop-1.13.tar.gz
tar -xzvf powertop-1.13.tar.gz
cd powertop-1.13
make
make install
cd ..
rm -rvf powertop-1.13.tar.gz

Just leave it running for 5+ minutes and you will get an estimate of usage.

Another useful power tool is acpi for getting battery information, and you install as follows:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/acpiclient/files/acpiclient/1.5/acpi-1.5.tar.gz/download
tar -xzvf acpi-1.5.tar.gz
cd acpi-1.5
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install
cd ..
rm -rvf acpi-1.5