How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/02/battery-applet-stat...

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How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

By Joey Sneddon, Published February 25, 2011
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For as long as I am able to remember the Battery indicator in Ubuntu has, for me, been just shy of useless. Whilst it pictorially displays my battery charge it hasnt been able to provide me with anything more: all I get for enquiring further is a never-changing estimating menu entry.

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Unsure if this was all the indicator was capable of doing I took to Twitter and asked my followers. Turns out that whilst it should tell me a bit more information than it currently many of you also see nothing but the same estimating menu entry. Thankfully a solution came courtesy of follower jknvv13 so thanks buddy!

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Battery-Status
Battery Status is a GNOME Panel applet capable of displaying detailed information about the battery. When run in traditional GNOME-Applet mode options such as adding time remaining or charger percentage into the icon are available.

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01/30/2012 02:23 PM

How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/02/battery-applet-stat...

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Installing Battery-Status in Ubuntu

Open a fresh Terminal session (applications > accessories > Terminal) and enter the following two lines separately, entering your user password where prompted. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:iaz/battery-status && sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install battery-status Once the applet is installed you can then add it to the Gnome panel. Achieve this by right-clicking on the chosen panel, selecting Add to Panel followed by Battery Applet. Finally press Add to place it. When prompted choose Replace or you will have two battery applets running. You can move it into desired position by right-clicking directly on the applet icon and choosing Move.

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Run Battery-Status as an Indicator Applet in Ubuntu

To run Battery Status as an Indicator-applet in Ubuntu including in Unity 2D) youll need to deploy the following command in a terminal: /usr/lib/battery-status/battery-status --indicator

To launch the indicator mode on log-in add it to your Start-up applications in System > Preferences > Startup Applications, entering the command above in the command eld.

Related posts: 1. Indicator-weather update puts temperature on panel 2. Ubuntu One Indicator Applet gets a PPA 3. Indicator-Keylock: control and monitor caps, num & scroll lock from the panel

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Login Jess Iniesta You're english could

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2 of 8

01/30/2012 02:23 PM

How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/02/battery-applet-stat...
use some improvement, and so does mine, but I think turning o the CAPS LOCK will be a good start ;)
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david4dev Great! Now I just need a working battery.

Drent Animaulet If somebody know a way to set the res to 1024x768 trough command line, or windowed mode... I have two monitors and the game starts in both at 2048x768 but the mouse is stuck in the rst monitor so I can't even start the game. Edit: OK, i just tried Alt+tab and the game runs in the rst monitor...
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Guilherme Sionek same here! =P oopy1962 People how can you dislike Kde... there is nothing in Kde to dislike :D if you campere it with gnome... lol gnome is 3.2 and will never be even close to Kde until it gets version 4 and above :D Kde is the best graphical interface for linux.. omg and there is kde for windows too :D you can set up...
KDE 4.8 Released With New Features,

Joey-Elijah Sneddon xD

dylan-m Just so folks know, there are a few long-standing bug reports on this issue: The system that is failing to estimate your battery life: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu... The UI that becomes useless when that happens: https://bugs.launchpad.net /ubu... The other half of that problem with the UI (there's some overlap): https://bugs.launchpad.net/hun... I have always had the feeling it aects a lot more users than is reasonable The reports don't really need more comments, but it never hurts to hit the Aects me too button at the top, and maybe to subscribe if you're interested. (And if you're very interested, the battery indicator still needs a patch and the x in upower still needs some testing).

Marky Nice. I'll try this out. Somehow .raw images fails when I try to mount it with "-o loop".
Mounty Simple Disk Image Mounter for

Jess Iniesta And what if we are using Precise? Can we get access to this lenses? The second PPA is not ready por precise, and the rst one... I haven't tried it, I'm not in the mood for breaking my system and installing it again (which is rare), but as it's a Unity PPA, may it have conicts with the "new"...
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Oxwivi Battery Indicator and Battery-Status should merge!

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madjr or that poor excuse for a battery indicator dropped and replaced by battery-status. In fact this also has most of cpu-freq applet built in. If an option is added to show/hide current cpu freq and/or battery-icon (for non battery using computers like desktops), then this could replace those 2 applets. Even Mark himself has stated in more than 1 occasion that

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3 of 8

01/30/2012 02:23 PM

How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/02/battery-applet-stat...

indicators should start merging to save space, else we'll have 100 of them in the panel, so this is an opportunity

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25 hours ago

dylan-m Battery-status and the power indicator are quite dierent. In its full glory, the power indicator is really a wonderful thing. It isn't just about the battery in your laptop: it aims to report about every battery that has anything to do with your computer. Devices that are charging over USB (this works with some iPods right now), cordless mouses, UPSs. Unfortunately, right now there are probably about ten systems in the world that have the power indicator in its full glory :b To get there with everything else, there needs to be a lot of work going on with the low level infrastructure so upower reports power levels for lots of dierent devices. I really hope that happens at some point, because it would be amazing. As for changing CPU frequency, I remember that being discussed pretty heavily quite recently. The general agreement seemed to be that it's something best kept to the system. A really important thing for saving battery life is time to idle, so if users keep throttling the CPU when it's about to do work they aren't going to help it. Consider most smartphones. Android doesn't expose this stu and it will keep a smartphone alive for a day just ne. It knows when stu is happening just ne on its own.

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22 hours ago

Oxwivi Indeed. I only suggested merger since I was feeling sympathetic as a bug has been reported and all (someone out there still cares about it). :P

Tom Slominski

Since I started using Ubuntu my laptop's battery life increased by about 17 hours! Wow!

digitalcircuit I think my battery lasts longer than yours... 200 days longer :P [IMG=http://img202.imageshack.us/im...][/IMG] (it's the Docky battery applet)

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01/30/2012 02:23 PM

How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/02/battery-applet-stat...

Tom Slominski

Wow. Are you stealing power from a nearby nuclear plant? :D

Tom Slominski

Wow. Are you stealing power from a nearby nuclear plant? :D

Obake Did it really increase the battery life? I will need to test this. :D

Tom Slominski Not, it didn't really.

Thameera Um.. seriously?

Tom Slominski No :D But the original battery indicator says so!

Joaquin Vacas ;) Don't thank me, Thank for you, for making OMG! Ubuntu! better!

Oxwivi The name mentioned in the article and yours are dierent! But thanks for the tip, I'm sure it helped thousands of OMG! Ubuntu! readers.

Joaquin Vacas #FAIL I'm Joaquin Vacas, but my twitter is jknvv13 http://twitter.com/#!/jknvv13 xD

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01/30/2012 02:23 PM

How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/02/battery-applet-stat...

Oxwivi I gured as much - just wanted to tease you. And there're a few Disqus users with some sort of username displayed instead of their real names (like me).

Joaquin Vacas Well, I can tweet something to you, and see my timeline from @jknvv13

Thameera Battery applet is unpredictable. Sometimes it would indicate 'Fully charged' even when the power cable is removed.

Wolter Hellmund Could also be that you battery's capacity has decreased. That happened to me, its capacity is a 48% of what it initially was.

Thameera Yes, the capacity is 66.7% of the original capacity. But still, that's not an excuse for the problem, is it?

Romain Richard Does what is says, I would continue to use it if only the indicator applet could display the remaining time/charge like the normal applet does (might be even better if it would be displayed on the battery icon and not next to it). Keep up the good work.

Joey-Elijah Sneddon I hoped that it would do that, too.

suli8 tried it on lucid. working well. shamefully i have the battery indicator not working properly on acer laptop also before the installation of the new applet. gets from 99% to 5% with one hit, and stays on 5% like 20 minutes... as for the applet itself....lot better than before.

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01/30/2012 02:23 PM

How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/02/battery-applet-stat...

Leaird Wedd I think I must be one of the few out there that doesn't care for indicator applets...I realize there are some things to be gained by integrating more UI options and setting a standard for how a user interacts with panel icons, but I just don't care for them. To me 'left-click' for default action and 'right-click' for menu with options was an obvious convention to follow for notication icons, although apparently not for some developers. Also I'm beginning to nd it irritating how Ubuntu (or perhaps Canonical) seems to insist upon itself, not by introducing options, but by avoiding 'papercuts' with new interfaces and APIs that are neither progressing upstream paradigms in Gnome, KDE, et al nor usable across those dierent desktop environments. In fact, it's starting to feel that just as 'all Debian developers are Ubuntu developers' but all Ubuntu developers are not Debian developers, all Gnome developers are Ubuntu developers, but not all Ubuntu developers are Gnome developers. To put it simply, Canonical seems to be spring-boarding o Linux, Debian and Gnome.

Gaurav Butola Now my battery icon is gone even after removing this applet. HELP.

Jrmy Nguyen thanh go to preferences --> power management. It should give list of options. select always display icon.

Gaurav Butola ah... there it is :D Thanks bro!

Nagi Reddy I tried this battery applet ,its working ne for some extent. The Battery status was not determined especially in case when i power-on laptop with out connecting AC power. It is displaying power icon with text "missing". When i connect power and disconnect it, from that state it is displaying battery status. Please help me what can i do..i cannot know when my battery goes down if status is not displayed...

Potato Queen I just installed the indicator but how come I don't have the "Show" menu?

Nagi Reddy just logout and login-> then from add panel add new battery panel then u can see menus..

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01/30/2012 02:23 PM

How to add a detailed battery indicator to Ubuntu

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/02/battery-applet-stat...

arjan strub what is 'add panel'? i still don't have the show menu and it doesnt start when i startup the pc even though i addedit to startup applications

diego_abad21 I use ubuntu 11.04 in classic ubuntu, but when i put this applet as my startup aplications, It didn't start. What can I do?

Ben Avery The 'show...' item isn't in the context menu from the app in indeicator mode. But if I run it in window mode, it's there. any ideas why? running Natty.

Arief Mochammad Rachman how to add to Gnome panel? I can't found gnome panel. I use Natty Narwhal..

yahoo-N6E3ZOMJQP6PSBCUSBZAXXGPI4 Is this supposed to work now? I only get the Estimating... info with the default application. For battery-status applet, I couldn't nd a repository for natty.

Teguh Wibowo "When prompted choose Replace or you will have two battery applets running." i forget to replace that, and now I have 2 battery indicators and don't even know how to replace default one. Any suggestions?

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