The situation in which I want to change the frequency arises when I'm running one compute-intensive background job per CPU at 'nice 5' so that I get decent performance in interactive jobs as well; it seems that the default governor regards the situation in which niced jobs are using 100% of the CPU as one in which it can happily set the speed down to 1GHz, which is not at all what I want. Possibly fixing that is more like the Right Answer.
BernardB has I think got it right. -- /usr/bin/cpufreq-selector should have different access permissions https://launchpad.net/bugs/23768 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs