Building & Installing PowerTOP
------------------------------

just type

	make
	make install




Build dependencies
------------------

PowerTOP uses C++, and expects g++ and libstdc++ to be functional

in addition to that, it needs the following components:

pciutils-devel
ncurses-devel
zlib-devel
libnl-devel

and a functional glibc/pthreads development environment



Outputting a report
-------------------
When invoking PowerTOP without arguments, it goes into interactive mode.
However, for reporting bugs etc there is a special reporting mode:

powertop --html

which will create a "powertop.html" file which is static and can be sent to
others to help diagnose power issues.



Calibrating & Power Numbers
---------------------------
PowerTOP will, when running on battery, track your power consumption as well
as your activity on the system. Once there are sufficient such measurements,
PowerTOP can start to report power estimates for various activities.
You can help get this estimation more accurate by running a calibration
cycle:

powertop --calibrate

at least once; this will cycle through various display brightness levels
(including "off") as well as USB device activities and some other workloads.





Code from other open source projects
------------------------------------
PowerTOP contains some code from other open source projects; we'd like to
thank the authors of those projects for their work. 
Specifically PowerTOP contains code from

nl80211 userspace tool - Copyright 2007, 2008	Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>




Extech Power Analyzer / Datalogger support
------------------------------------------
I use, and our analysis teams use, the Extech Power Analyzer/Datalogger
(model number 380803) quite a lot, and PowerTOP supports using this
device over the serial cable. Just pass the device node on the command line
like this

powertop --extech=/dev/ttyUSB0

(where ttyUSB0 is the devicenode of the serial-to-usb adapter on my system)