Battery indicator for Openbox

[mjjzf]

So, a question I have asked many places:
I am using Openbox with Pypanel. And that is fine, except I don't have a battery monitor, and that is necessary for me, since I use my laptop on the road a lot. Now, the thing is: It should be in the system tray, so I can see it even if I am running maximized programs. This rules out programs like Conky and desklets in general. Dependencies are not too important - I am willing to lose a bit of space and resources for this function.
Any pointers?

[timttmy]

I'm not familiar with pypanel but can you add batmon or lm-batmon to it?

[mjjzf]

Pypanel is just a generic panel with a systray.
As I understand it, you can not make an info tray icon with Batmon?

[mjjzf]

The thing is, in Xfce I use the genmon plugin to poll my battery script and output "x%" on the panel, as you can see here. Essentially, I just need an application which will dock into the systray and display the battery value, possibly on mouseover.

[timttmy]

puppy uses batmon in the panel on jwm. Maybe you could get some clues from there scripts here. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=12394.
Or maybe I'm missing something and it can't be done.

[jezra]

Although not a panel applet, xbattbar might suit your needs. On a system running Openbox and fbpanel,I launch xbattbar from the .xinitrc with

Code: Select all

xbattbar-acpi -s 2 -p left -I "dark green" -O "black" &

This gives me a 2 pixel wide line on the left of my monitor that displays battery charge. Mousing over the line displays more information.

[mjjzf]

I seem to have some annoying compile errors. Maybe it is the classic libconfig vs. libconfig-debian issue.

[dpkgregor]

Ever tried Noteo?

http://bavardage.awardspace.com/noteo/

http://bavardage.awardspace.com/noteo/w ... stallation

Also, I found AsaPM
http://freshmeat.net/projects/asapm/

[mjjzf]

Noteo would be nice, if I could find out how to knock together the plugin.

[timttmy]

This thread got me thinking about the lack of a battery warning tool on the cli.
Would this do it? (running in the background ).

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
# /home/marshall/Documents/battery.sh A script to warn of battery faliure.

rc=`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state | grep 'remaining capacity' | cut -c 26-28`

low=`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info | grep 'design capacity low' | cut -c 26-28`

if [ $rc -lt $low ] ; then
   cat /home/marshall/crapalert.wav > /dev/dsp
else
   /home/marshall/Documents/battery.sh
fi


Anyone know a better way? I'm not happy with the else part, I haven't figured out while or sleep yet (don't laugh)