eee-control is so far the best utility for controlling Eee PC hardware under Linux.

It definitely does its job, instead of the now obsolete not-working-at-all eee-applet program, and has is even better than eeepc-tray, whose development has now been explicitly stopped by its author, for a couple of reasons:

1. has better hardware control for powersaving (e.g. this can also toggle the card reader)
2. does not depend on the mono runtime environment, thus requiring far less resources both on the hard disk and in the RAM memory.

eee-control Features

• ACPI support for hotkeys, LCD brightness control and hardware toggles
• Toggle hardware (WiFi, Bluetooth, card reader, webcam, touchpad) on and off
• Easy graphical configuration of hotkey actions
• Better (finer granularity, more silent) fan control
• Extended LCD brightness (brighter and darker than the default range)
• Notifications/OSD (fully configurable)
• Performance control (adjusts FSB and CPU voltage) for saving power and/or overclocking
• gnome-power-manager integration for automatic performance adjustment
• Fine-grained configuration through a configuration file (/etc/eee-control.conf)
• Monitor for hardware sensors (fan, temperature)
• Clean architecture:
  • eee-control-daemon (low level operations, hardware abstraction, runs with root privileges)
  • eee-control-tray (GTK/GNOME GUI, configuration, OSD)
  • D-Bus for communication

In order to install eee-control you have to

• for Ubuntu Hardy and Jaunty download the deb file from the author website http://greg.geekmind.org/eee-control/deb/
• for Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 and Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 add the eee-control PPA repository to your Third Party Software Sources (Administration – Software Sources) type in:

ppa:eee-control/eee-control

Than update the packages archive and install eee-control package with the Package Manager or in a terminal type sudo apt-get install eee-control
(Thank you Maarten Fonville for maintaining it!)

• NOTE: for Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 you may have to add this string to your kernel GRUB boot:

  acpi_osi=Linux
  

  Then the eeepc_laptop module will load correct during the boot, and eee-control-daemon will start. (Thank you very much to Jesper for this tip!)

• NOTE2: I’ve upgraded my system today and eee-control worked flawlessly without the need of this fix. However this seems to be due to the slowliness of my netbook. In case you still encounter this problem a complete solution to the problem has been smartly highlighted by Iustinian T. in the comment here below. (Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us!)

Move eee-control to Upstart for proper loading at boot time

update: starting from version eee-control 0.9.6.2 upstart support has been integrated into eee-control. The following paragraphs do not apply any more. The updated package can be fetched from eee-control ppa.

Here I would detail in a more clear way Iustinian T suggestions:

1. remove eeepc_laptop module from /etc/modules
2. create a file in /etc/event.d/rc2 named eee-control
3. fill it with the following text


eee-control.conf
start on started dbus
stop on [S06]

exec /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/eee-control-daemon

pre-start script
modprobe eeepc_laptop
end script

post-stop script
modprobe -r eeepc_laptop
end script


1. Remove daemonize options from eee-control-daemon python script: which would imply basically removing this paragraph from /usr/bin/eee-control-daemon


# Use the option -V to disable daemonization
__builtin__._loglevel = 0
if len(sys.argv) > 1 and sys.argv[1] == "-V": __builtin__._loglevel = 3
else:
# Daemonize
EeeControl.daemonize.become_daemon(our_home_dir="/")
# Create a PID file
f = open(PIDFILE, "w")
f.write(str(os.getpid()))
f.close()


Reference for upstart

Reboot is required for both the daemon and the systray applet to load.

Related posts:

1. Managing startup services
2. Runlevels
3. Parcellite crash on icon click, Zim does not load
4. Speed up Ubuntu Linux!
5. Configure GRUB2 options and background