battery monitor with KDE 64 bit

[mato]

Ian Smith wrote:
> 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
>
>   

Ian, thanks! :-)

I've been using wmbsdbatt but it isn't configurable at all and often I 
just didn't notice my battery gone flat.  Now I've switched to asapm 
which provides better visual attention (battery turning red) and more 
importantly I could configure it to produce notifications via 
notify-send and xmessage, so it's unlikely I'll miss my battery running 
flat.  :-))

Cheers,

Martin