I’ve been using the CPU frequency monitor applet in Gnome to see the speed at which my Pentium-M chip is running, and noticed that it rarely gets up to the 1.6Ghz that it’s capable of. While I tend to prefer the dynamic scaling behaviour when running on batteries, when I’m plugged in I want top processor performance.
I did a little digging and found the answer (where else), in the README (/usr/share/doc/gnome-applets-data/README.Debian). It turns out that the cpufreq applet ships with the SUID bit unset (for security reasons), but you can enable it using by reconfiguring using dpkg-reconfigure:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets
Just choose ‘Yes’ to set the SUID bit for the cpufreq-selector executable and you’ll be able to left-click on the applet and set the the CPU frequency manually.
