PyPowerMan is a little tool to use for power management of your laptop. It is thought as a replacement for KPowersave, that is not included in Ubuntu furthermore.
With PyPowerMan you can use different usage profiles. I.e. you can set up one profile to use on ac power, one profile to use with battery and a additional profile to use while a presentation.
For each profile you can define:
the initial screen dimm level
the timeout when to dimm the screen to lowest level
the timeout when to blank the screen
the timeout when to suspend the laptop
the suspend mode to use after timeout (either suspend to ram or to disk)
the suspend mode to use when the lid is closed
the cpu governor to use
There are also some general options to set:
the default profile to use while on ac power
the default profile to use while on battery power
should the profile automatically be changed if the power source changes
should there be a message if the battery is fully loaded
should there be a message if the battery is half loaded (i.e. for stocking)
the battery level when to display warnings
disable dpms
enforce settings of the current profile (this means i.e. that the cpu governor is reset to the profiles settings even if the governor was changed manually via kernel interface)
PyPowerMan is written in Python and PyGTK. There is a daemon process that manages the actions and a systray applet that displays a battery icon and provides a setup dialog.