xfce-battery plugin

[Andy Choens]

On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 21:58, rfa at msumain.edu.ph wrote:
> [super noob alert]
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
>    I was wondering what to run to get the xfce-battery-plugin working? i
> can't seem to find the documentation for this... any ideas?

I've got some ideas that you might find helpful, but I can't guarantee
anything.  Battery support in Linux is complicated, to say the least. 
I'll try to answer this in a question answer format.  Read this like a
choose your own adventure novel and hopefully you'll have a good idea of
what you need to do.

In short, this depends on 2 of three things.  There are two different
daemons that handle this, depending on the age of the laptop.  APMD
(older laptops) or ACPID (newer laptops).  Then you have to have
xfce4-battery-plugin installed on your system.  If the battery plugin is
installed, then you can add it to your applications panel.  You can add
the battery plugin to your applications panel by right-clicking on the
panel and adding a battery monitor.  It will appear on the far right of
your applications panel.  If it doesn't recognize your battery, things
get more complicated.

1)    Can you monitor the battery levels from GNOME or KDE?  If Yes,
then make sure you have the battery plugin-in installed.  Or, add it to
your panel.  If No, go on to 2.
2)  How old is your laptop?  If it's more than a couple of years old, it
probably needs apmd installed and turned on at start.  If it's newer
than that, then you will need acpid installed and turned on at stat-up. 
People will be able to help you more with how to check this if you tell
us what distribution you use.  
    If the appropriate plugin isn't installed, install them both and
experiment.  If it doesn't start working, then it will help if you tell
us what kind of a laptop you have and what distribution you use.

I hope this helps get you started.  When I first got into Linux, this
was something that was really hard to get working.  Things have improved
but aren't always perfect yet.  But, it's well worth getting this
going.  I hope this helps.

--andy


Om Mani Padme Hume
        --Traditional Tibetan Blessing