# Battery Charge Monitor Manual

Battery Charge Monitor shows the current charge of the battery and provides notifications if charge drops below a certain threshold.

2005
Davyd Madeley
2004
Angela Boyle
2004
Sun Microsystems
2002
Trevor Curtis
1999
2000
Jorgen Pehrson
GNOME Documentation Project

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Sun
GNOME Documentation Team
Sun Microsystems
Trevor
Curtis
GNOME Documentation Project

     tcurtis@somaradio.ca

Jorgen
Pehrson
GNOME Documentation Project

     jp@spektr.eu.org

Angela
Boyle
GNOME Documentation Project
Davyd
Madeley
GNOME Project
Version 2.12
September 2005

Davyd Madeley

Version 2.10
March 2005

Davyd Madeley

Version 2.8
September 2004

Angela Boyle

GNOME Documentation Project

Battery Charge Monitor Applet Manual V2.2
August 2004

Sun GNOME Documentation Team

GNOME Documentation Project

Battery Charge Monitor Applet Manual V2.0
May 2002

Trevor Curtis tcurtis@somaradio.ca

Jorgen Pehrson jp@spektr.eu.org

GNOME Documentation Project

This manual describes version 2.12.0 of Battery Charge Monitor.

## Feedback

To report a bug or make a suggestion regarding the Battery Charge Monitor applet or this manual, follow the directions in the GNOME Feedback Page.

## Introduction

### Battery Charge Monitor Applet

The Battery Charge Monitor applet.

The Battery Charge Monitor shows the status of any batteries in your laptop computer. The monitor can tell you the capacity remaining both visually and as a percentage, as well as offer you an estimate of the time remaining based off the current usage rate.

### To Add Battery Charge Monitor to a Panel

To add Battery Charge Monitor to a panel, right-click on the panel, then choose Add to Panel. Select Battery Charge Monitor in the Add to the panel dialogue, then click OK.

The layout of the Battery Charge Monitor applet varies depending on the size and type of panel in which the applet resides.

### Power Management Backends

The battery monitor supports a number of power management backends. If it is available, the monitor will attempt to use the freedesktop.org HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). If it is unavailable or unsupported on your platform, the battery monitor will attempt direct access to the power management system.

Not all power management backends are available from all vendors, and some vendors add their own additional backends for specific platforms and hardware. If the battery monitor is misreporting information from your battery see .

### Getting Help

If the battery monitor doesn't work for you, see these additional resources:

- ;

- GNOME mailing lists

## Preferences

To bring up the preferences for the monitor, right-click on the monitor in the panel and then choose Preferences

### Battery Charge Monitor context (right-click) menu

Battery Charge Monitor context menu

### Preferences Dialogue

Preferences Dialogue

Appearance
  Compact view

    This view shows only a single graphic in the panel, either an upright battery to indicate remaining capacity or a plug to indicate your laptop is connected to an external power source.

    ### Compact view

    Compact View

    The compact view is the default view for the monitor as of GNOME 2.12.

  Expanded view

    The expanded view is old look from previous versions of GNOME. It has the larger graphic for the battery as well as a separate graphic to indicate what state the battery is in.

    ### Expanded view

    Expanded View
  Show time/percentage

    Selecting this option will display one of two pieces of information. Show time remaining will tell you how many hours and minutes until the battery is fully discharged or recharged. Show percentage remaining will tell you the percentage charge remaining in the battery.

Notifications

  - Warn when battery charge drops to

    Selecting this option will cause a warning dialogue to be displayed whenever your laptop battery reaches specified value, either as a percentage remaining or a number of minutes remaining. This indicates that the amount of charge remaining in your battery is critically low. charge. You can dismiss this warning dialogue yourself, otherwise it will vanish automatically when you plug your laptop into mains power.

  - Notify when the battery is fully recharged

    Selecting this option notifies when your battery is fully recharged. If you have compiled the Battery Charge Monitor with libnotify support a non-intrusive notification will popup from the monitor on the panel.

## Troubleshooting

Due to the complexities of power management and the vast differences between each of the different power management systems available, debugging errors in the battery monitor can be difficult. You will need to determine if the error exists in the battery monitor or is a bug in the information provided by your machine.

The following information may be useful for troubleshooting what is wrong with your battery monitor. It is by no means exhaustive. If you find a bug with the Battery Charge Monitor (that is not caused by bad information being reported by ACPI), please report it.

### Determining the backend

If you are using the Hardware Abstraction Layer (see ) then that will be indicated in the about dialogue by placing a star next to the author of the HAL backend.

#### Check you're using the HAL backend

Expanded View

Other backends do not currently give indication they are being used, so you will have to guess based on your hardware. Most modern PC laptops are using ACPI as the backend. This is also the backend with the largest number of inconsistencies.

### Checking the ACPI information

If you are using the ACPI backend for the Battery Charge Monitor, it is important to check that ACPI is giving you the right information. If it isn't, then you will need to look into upgrading your DSDT or something else related to ACPI.

#### Example ACPI output

    [rupert@laptop ~]$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info
    present:                 yes
    design capacity:         41040 mWh
    last full capacity:      37044 mWh
    battery technology:      rechargeable
    design voltage:          10800 mV
    design capacity warning: 745 mWh
    design capacity low:     0 mWh
    capacity granularity 1:  10 mWh
    capacity granularity 2:  10 mWh
    model number:            G71C00056110
    serial number:           0000000008
    battery type:            Li-ION
    OEM info:
    [rupert@laptop ~]$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
    present:                 yes
    capacity state:          ok
    charging state:          discharging
    present rate:            11232 mW
    remaining capacity:      27140 mWh
    present voltage:         11400 mV
    [rupert@laptop ~]$

You can quickly calculate the percentage remaining using remaining capacity divided by last full capacity, you can calculate the time remaining by taking remaining capacity divided by present rate.

### Hardware Abstraction Layer

You can check that your battery is detected by HAL using the command `hal-device-manager`. If your battery is not detected by HAL or the wrong information is being reported, you can attempt to disable the HAL backend by setting a GConf key.

Select Configuration Editor from the Applications menu, under System Tools. Search for the key value OAFIID:GNOME_BattstatApplet which should be located in the path `/apps/panel/applets`.

Assuming the path is `/apps/panel/applets/applet_1`. In `/apps/panel/applets/applet_1/prefs` add a New Key... called no_hal and set it to the boolean value of true. This will disable the usage of HAL (see to learn how to check this).