&applet; 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 MATE Documentation Project &legal; Sun MATE Documentation Team Sun Microsystems Trevor Curtis MATE Documentation Project

tcurtis@somaradio.ca

Jorgen Pehrson MATE Documentation Project

jp@spektr.eu.org

Angela Boyle MATE Documentation Project Davyd Madeley MATE Project Version 2.12 September 2005 Davyd Madeley Version 2.10 March 2005 Davyd Madeley Version 2.8 September 2004 Angela Boyle MATE Documentation Project Battery Charge Monitor Applet Manual V2.2 August 2004 Sun GNOME Documentation Team MATE Documentation Project Battery Charge Monitor Applet Manual V2.0 May 2002 Trevor Curtis tcurtis@somaradio.ca Jorgen Pehrson jp@spektr.eu.org MATE Documentation Project This manual describes version &appletversion; of &applet;. To report a bug or make a suggestion regarding the &applet; applet or this manual, follow the directions in the MATE Feedback Page. Battery Charge Monitor Applet Battstat Applet

The &applet; applet.

The &applet; 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 &applet; to a panel, right-click on the panel, then choose Add to Panel. Select &applet; in the Add to the panel dialog, then click OK. The layout of the &applet; applet varies depending on the size and type of panel in which the applet resides. The battery monitor supports a number of power management backends. If it is available, the monitor will attempt to use the freedesktop.org upower interface. If it is unavailable or unsupported on your platform, it will fall back to the freedesktop.org HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). If that is also not availble, 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 . If the battery monitor doesn't work for you, see these additional resources: ; MATE mailing lists To bring up the preferences for the monitor, right-click on the monitor in the panel and then choose Preferences

&applet; context menu

Preferences Dialog

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

The compact view is the default view for the monitor as of MATE 2.12. Expanded view The expanded view is old look from previous versions of MATE. It has the larger graphic for the battery as well as a separate graphic to indicate what state the battery is in.

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 dialog 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 dialog 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 &applet; with libnotify support a non-intrusive notification will popup from the monitor on the panel. 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 &applet; (that is not caused by bad information being reported by ACPI), please report it. If you are using the upower interface, or the Hardware Abstraction Layer (see ) then that will be indicated in the about dialog by placing a star next to the author of 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. If you are using the ACPI backend for the &applet;, 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. [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. 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 GSettings key. Select Configuration Editor from the Applications menu, under System Tools. Search for the key value OAFIID:MATE_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).