ok, I'll try that this evening. That is to say, I already run an unstable debian, so I don't know if your procedure is still necessary (sorry, I forgot to tell that I run a debian sid in my previous mails).
On sid, you don't have to do any of the kernel recompilation. Things should "just work".
I already did this. This is a nice little program and I followed all suggestions (most of them forced me to recompile my kernel), but this didn't change anything.
Did Powertop show any frequency scaling going on, or was your system permanently running at its full frequency? You may want to try it with the Debian kernel again - it never asked me to recompile my kernel, and it did manage to find that frequency scaling was turned off.
Is this still to test since I run a debian sid? Can it be that the power management works well on testing and not with sid?
Btw, I tried the 2.6.22 precompiled kernel from sid too, but it did not work better.
No, sid should work as well as (if not better than) testing. I'm wondering if this is just an issue with the very newest MacBooks (I have a first-generation one, and it works fine). You shouldn't have to recompile the kernel in any case with
2.6.22.
Where can I go from there?
One thing you could try is adding acpi_cpufreq and cpufreq_ondemand to /etc/modules. That may enable frequency scaling if its disabled. Also, make sure all the ACPI-related packages are installed by running "tasksel" and making sure "Laptop" is selected.
Tim