Right clicking on panel and selecting “Add to Panel” and choosing “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor” creates an invisible icon in which you need to guess where it is if you want to remove the invisible
icon from the panel by right clicking everywhere. If you catch its location, you can manage to get to the preferences etc but that doesn't help with using the applet. I've seen this bug closed but
the bug is still very much there on 32 and 64 bit Lenny! (I am reporting from 64 bit Lenny computer) This is important since it can allow students like myself to lock our CPU's multipliers at 6x
(Core 2 Duo or Pentium Dual-Core for example) and save battery power; it can also be (slightly) useful for over-clockers that don't always need the extra speed! And of course, it can be used by
those who just want to be environmentally friendly.

severity 518382 important
thanks

Le jeudi 05 mars 2009 à 14:34 -0500, Deniz Akcal a écrit :

Is cpufrequtils installed?

It is a common mistake to think you will save power by locking down the
frequency. By doing so, you are actually increasing the power
consumption. The only thing you should do to save power is to set the
CPU frequency governor to “ondemand” – something that cpufrequtils will
do for you.

For more information, see http://mjg59.livejournal.com/88608.html

(And please don’t bring up “environmentally friendly” arguments, we’re
all using computers that imply huge pollution for both fabricating and
destructing them.)

I see the same problem.
cpufrequtils is installed.

Of course, with the "on demand" gouvernor, the applet is not
that neccessary. But this is not the only applet with limited
usefulness, I think.

My panels are slightly transparent. This makes the location of the
applet visible since it ignores this transparency.

See attached screenshots.

Regards, Meik

That is a good argument however for applications such as folding@home that are running programs that will always assign more workloads to the CPU when it completes the current workload, limiting the clock speed does in fact reduce power consumption, etc. I use folding@home and would like to have it locked at half the clock speed so that the computer doesn't start needing to spin the fan even ocassionally.

--- On Fri, 3/6/09, Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> wrote:

From: Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>
Subject: Re: Bug#518382: gnome-applets: CPU Frequency Scaling Is Invisible when added to panel and is therefore unusable!
To: "Deniz Akcal" <gamingtechnology@yahoo.ca>, 518382@bugs.debian.org
Received: Friday, March 6, 2009, 10:39 AM

severity 518382 important
thanks

Le jeudi 05 mars 2009 à 14:34 -0500, Deniz Akcal a écrit :

Is cpufrequtils installed?

It is a common mistake to think you will save power by locking down the
frequency. By doing so, you are actually increasing the power
consumption. The only thing you should do to save power is to set the
CPU frequency governor to “ondemand” – something that cpufrequtils will
do for you.

For more information, see http://mjg59.livejournal.com/88608.html

(And please don’t bring up “environmentally friendly” arguments, we’re
all using computers that imply huge pollution for both fabricating and
destructing them.)

tag 518382 confirmed
thanks

I'm experiencing this problem too.
Installed cpufrequtils and it says (when starting the initscript) that the
governor is not available.
Also when using cpufreq-selector as user it says I can't acquire
org.gnome.CPUFreqSelector because of some security policies in the
configuration file. I've granted to my user to use org.gnome.CPUFreqSelector
through polkit but nothing changed. Is the problemthat missing governor?

I have the same problem. Especially annoying since invisible applets are hard
to remove from the panel...