Introducing Granola a software to help save some energy from your PC, and in the while help the nature.
This is a small followup from my article Linux for a green Desktop
Granola site say:
“Granola will green up your Linux or Microsoft Windows computers by cutting energy consumption by up to 35%. This will not only save you money, but help to save the planet by reducing CO2 emisions. Granola will not turn off your computer or give you any noticable performance loss, and it is totally free! Do your part to save the planet by installing Granola.”
I’m now testing it on my Ubuntu 10.04
System Requirements
Granola has the following requirements:
* The following Linux distributions:
- Debian 5.0 and unstable
- Fedora 8-12
- RHEL 4 and 5
- SLES 10
- Ubuntu 7.04-10.04
* Hardware support for Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). DVFS is available on most modern Intel and AMD processors, but may require being enabled in your computer’s BIOS (read granola wiki page for information on known models). If DVFS is not available, or turned off, Granola will let you know when it attempts to start up for the first time.
Installation
You have 2 choice to install granola : use their magic script that will add the repository (work for Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora and Suse) and install the software or do it manually, i’ve done it manually following these steps:
1. sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
2. Download and install (sudo dpkg -i package) this package.
3. sudo apt-get update
4. apt-cache search MiserWare (now you should see granola)
5. sudo aptitude install granola granola-gui
For other distro it’s available a tar ball that you can download at the url: http://grano.la/help/?os=linux&download
All done, granola daemon will start immediately and set up to autostart at boot, to check how your saving is going you can use granola-gui that will show a small g on your notification area.
granola-gui
The graphic interface is intuitive and well made and can show the total of what you have saved up or annual projection, showing the savings in terms of money, KW/H and CO2.
In the settings menu, you can change the power management policies of Granola and set some other options.
The “Management Policy” submenu allows you to adjust power management of your computer. The default setting of “MiserWare” in the middle allows Granola to dynamically adjust the power so that you only use what you need. Selecting “Highest Power” allows you to set your computer to always use the highest power setting. You will see no energy savings at this setting. Selecting “Lowest Speed” will set your computer to the lowest power setting. This setting will save as much power as possible, but will slow down your computer and give noticeable performance loss. It is recommended that you leave this option set to “MiserWare” so that you will save energy while not sacrificing any performance.
Also in the Settings menu is the “Set Energy Price…” option. Clicking on this will allows you to enter your cost per kilowatt/hour to make your monetary savings display more accurate. You can then set the unit used for monetary and CO2 savings to either US Dollars or British Pounds and pounds or kilograms by selecting the appropriate option from the Settings menu. The “Reporting Time” submenu will let you change the view from your cumulative savings to projected annual savings and back.
Granola Online
it’s also possible to register an account on Granola site and send up to 5 computer information there to track your savings across machines through their website.
The bed news
From Granola site:
Are you going to release Granola as open source?
In an effort to provide you with the best possible software we can, we have included much of our proprietary technology in Granola. This technology is what makes it possible for Granola to save you energy while maintaining the performance of your machines. We have a responsibility to protect our intellectual property and build a thriving business since MiserWare development is privately funded, so for now we are not releasing Granola under an open source license.
The Python scripts released in Granola is currently under the BSD license (available here), and we plan to expand the amount of open source software we provide in the future.
It’s a bit sad to see that also a company that work toward a so great goal think close source = business, while open source is a waste of my work.
Well, let’s hope that they can change their mind as soon as possible.
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