setCPUandMouse.sh

a startup script for automated powerplan setting and clock speed setting, can also disable mouse acceleration

• setCPUandMouse.sh - terminal version, can be used in automation
• setCPUandMouse-gui.sh - gui verion, using zenity, not recommended to be used in automation
  • has one advantage, can be run during any point to set laptop/desktop into high performance mode or powersaver mode

Information

This script has 2 modes that can be used. User input based execution mode and automated execution mode.

To run the script u need to set either 1 or 3 parameters based on what mode u want to use.

Make sure to adjust the clock speed of the cpu based on your setup. Ckeck Changing the clock speed limit for more information.

Dependencies

Some will be installed by the script automatically

• indicator-cpufreq [automatic install]
• cpufrequtils [automatic install]
• zenity [has to be installed by the user]
  • used by setCPUandMouse-gui.sh

User input based execution mode

as the name suggests in this mode every step will ask the user for input, useful if run manually

To execute the script in this mode run it as follows

sudo bash /home/beangreen247/autostart_bin/setCPUandMouse.sh user

You will be asked a couple questions so answer them as needed.

Automated execution mode

as for this one, this one is my personal favorite as it will run on its own and can be used in crontab -e at startup

# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command
@reboot echo "user_password_here" | sudo -S bash /home/beangreen247/autostart_bin/setCPUandMouse.sh auto oem performance

Changing the clock speed limit

To change the clock speed limit look for lines that contain cpupower frequency-set and there change the minimum (--min) and maximum (--max) frequency.

To get the desired number to put in, take the desired frequency in GHz and multiply by 1000000.

For example lets say that my desired min frequency is 100 MHz. So I will take that number, convert it to GHz, that would be 0.1 GHz and multiply this by 1000000 to get 100000 as shown in the provided script. The maximum frequency is counted the same way, but here we took the GHz value already (that would be 2.3 GHz) so just multiply it by 1000000 giving us 2300000.

For those interested the -g flag sets the cpu governor.

Prerequisites

Before running the script make it executable just in case

chmod +x setCPUandMouse.sh

And replace the example password user_password_here with your root password.

Execution explained

To explain the execution of the script well it goes basically like this.

1. It installs dependencies in order for the script to work properly. This step is depended on either user input or automated execution. Here you should decide based on what type of kernel you have in your Ubuntu install. For example if you use the regular kernel like I do on my desktop then pick generic. But if you run an oem kernel like I do on my laptop that pick oem. This can be checked by running this command in the terminal

   uname -a

   example output:

   Linux IdeaPad-5-14ITL05 5.17.0-1019-oem #20-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Tue Sep 27 13:20:28 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

   In the example above we can see a string like kernel_version-oem so in this example that is 5.17.0-1019-oem. Based on this information we have decided to set the kernel type parameter to oem in our automation. This can be done in user input execution mode as well. If there is just 5.17.0-1019 then pick generic.

2. The third and final parameter to decide on is what performance governor you want to use. In this script there are two modes usable, that being powersave or performance. This should be self explanatory.

How to check governor setting

Run this command in the terminal after startup or after script execution

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

example output

beangreen247@IdeaPad-5-14ITL05:~$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
performance
performance
performance
performance
performance
performance
performance
performance

Supported OS's

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release