battery monitor with KDE 64 bit

[Ian Smith]

On Mon, 7 Apr 2008, martinko wrote:
 > Lars Engels wrote:
 > > Quoting martinko <gamato at users.sf.net>:
 > >> Hi Lars,
 > >>
 > >> sysutils/nbosd looks very nice and rather useful, thanks! :-)
 > >>
 > >> However, I can think of the following:
 > >>
 > >> There are 2 important/interesting information missing:
 > >> - remaining run-time in hours:minutes when running on battery
 > >> - CPU temperature (especially on laptops)
 > >
 > > Good idea, it should be no problem to use sysctl to get those values.
 > >
 > >> Also, it might be quite useful to render battery related info in red
 > >> colour once battery charge drops below some (configurable) limit when
 > >> not running on AC power.
 > >>
 > >> The last but not least important is this -- nbosd shows you info on
 > >> demand only.  I find that most often I forget about my battery running
 > >> flat and thus nbosd wouldn't help.  Any idea how to deal with it ?
 > >
 > > nbosd was designed to show the value on demand. I have a keyboard 
 > > shortcut which shows me the OSD whenever I need it.
 > > But the shortcut doesn't work in every case e.g. when playing 
 > > fullscreen games. So I taught nbosd to work together with devd and now 
 > > nbosd has an option to run as a daemon and only shows up when the 
 > > battery percentage falls below a user-defined value.
 > > It still has some rough corners and the code needs to be cleaned up 
 > > that's why I haven't committed the new version.
 > > I hope that my (very limited atm :-( ) time allows me get it finished, 
 > > soon.
 > >
 > 
 > Hi Lars,
 > 
 > Remaining run-time (hours:minutes) could be next to the percentage value.
 > I'm not sure about the temperature, though.
 > 
 > I've set up a keyboard shotcut too (in WMaker) and it works great.
 > However, sometimes I forget I'm running on battery and only find out 
 > when my laptop dies abruptly.  That's why I'm trying to figure out how 
 > best to prevent such situations.
 > 
 > And what do you say about my suggestion to render battery life text and 
 > graphics in red when running on DC and too low ?  Would it be possible ?

You may also like to have a look at sysutils/asapm which I've been using
for years to good effect in KDE.  Despite the name, and the initial
blurb in pkg_descr, it works fine (better, actually) with ACPI, as
detailed in the manual.  It's also fully configurable regarding display
colours etc, and if the remaining runtime isn't directly available, it
can monitor state of charge over time to provide pretty good estimates,
along with configurable setpoints for 'warning' and 'alarm' colours.  I
can't say whether it works on amd64 though ..

On later (i386) machines I tend to use gkrellm which includes CPU temp,
speed and much more, but again I don't know if it works with amd64.

hth, Ian