The Intel Atom chips found in most netbooks include some nifty power management features that makes it easy to overclock or underclock the CPU depending on whether you want to prioritize performance or long battery life. Asus and a handful of other PC makers make it incredibly easy to toggle between high performance and power saving modes with software such as the Asus Super Hybrid Engine. But if you’re running a version of Linux that didn’t come with your netbook, you might not have access to these tools. And that’s where Jupiter comes in.

This Linux utility adds a power management applet to your system tray. You can use Jupiter to switch between maximum performance, high performance, and power saving modes. Jupiter also lets you adjust your computer’s screen resolution and orientation. And you can click a button to disable your netbook’s WiFi, webcam, or other hardware to save power when you don’t need those features.

Jupiter is based on the eeetray applet EeePC ACPI Utilities designed for Asus Eee PC netbooks. It should work with Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions. There’s also an RPM package available, which suggests that it should also work with Fedora, Red Hat, and similar Linux distributions.

via Netbooked and OMG Ubuntu

Apple may not be releasing a netbook (or at least now one as we know it) anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t releasing software for netbooks. In what I can only guess is a happy accident, MSI Wind users who have installed hacked versions of OS X on their netbooks report that upgrading the operating system to the recently release OS X 10.5.7 results in significantly better battery life. Some users say that they’re getting 4.5 to 5 hours of battery life out of 6 cell MSI Wind batteries instead of the 3 hours and 45 minutes they used to get.

Odds are this is the result of overall performance enhancements and bug fixes in the latest version of the Mac operating system. But it is also possible that it’s not a coincidence. What if Apple is not only working on a mini-notebook or tablet, but one that uses the same Intel Atom processor as most existing netbooks. Wouldn’t the company try to optimize its operating system to play well with this low power chip?

I mean, that’s probably not what’s going on here, but it’s fun to speculate isn’t it? Why don’t you give it a try in the comments.

via Gizmodo