laptop power management!

[John Dangler]

On Fri, 2006-12-29 at 18:37 +1100, Peter Garrett wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 19:45:02 -0200
> Ricardo C O Freitas <ricardocastanho at uol.com.br> wrote:
> 
> > It just SUSPEND or SHUTDOWN when the battery is on CRITICAL!!! 
> > 
> > No WARNINGS!!!
> 
> There's probably another way, but I use the "gkrellm" monitor to give me
> battery warnings ( sudo aptitude install gkrellm ) . Gkrellm has a battery
> monitor built in, and in the configuration under "Battery" you can set
> commands under Setup --> Alerts. You can also set "low" limits and "low
> alarm" limits ( for instance 105, 5% ). 
> 
> The commands can be whatever you prefer - I made a little script and put
> it in /usr/local/bin , like this:
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> # Battery alarm sound and warning popup
> 
> xmessage "Your battery is at less than 5 percent" &
> ogg123 /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Error_1.ogg
> 
> exit 0
> 
> Of course, you can  use any sound or warning command you prefer. The only
> downside to this is that gkrellm must be running - but in my case I always
> have it running anyway, because it keeps me informed about what the
> machine is doing :) The default skin for gkrellm is kind of ugly, but
> there are *lots* of skins available from
> 
> http://www.muhri.net/gkrellm/
> 
> Peter
> 
I'm running Dapper 6.06 LTS...
It's odd that my power managment icon showed up in the status bar of my
laptop until my last reboot, and now it no longer shows at all.  But,
when it was there, it seemed to work ok, except that I had to mouse over
it to know (in text) how much power was left on the battery.  It didn't
seem to be that accurate, though.  At one point, mousing over would say
"you have 3 hours 45 minutes of power left"... and then, 5 minutes later
- "you have 2 hours 12 minutes of power left"... and then, 10 minutes
later - "You have 3 hours 58 minutes of power left"...