Battstat Applet

The Battstat Applet, shown in Figure 1, shows the status of the power subsystem in your laptop. To add this applet to your Panel, right click on the Panel and select Panel->Add to panel->Applet->Monitors->Battery Status Utility.

Usage

Battstat applet requires no user input. You can, if you so desire, configure it to some degree as described below.

Figure 1: Laptop running on AC.

The figure above is shown when the laptop battery is fully charged.

Figure 2: Battery recharging.

The little flash over the power cord is shown when the laptop battery is recharging. It's flashing on and off until the battery is fully recharged.

Figure 3: Laptop running on battery.

When you are running your laptop on battery it will display this image.

Figure 4: The applet menu

Right-clicking on the applet brings up a menu containing the following items:

• Properties... - opens the Properties dialog window.
• About... - Shows basic information about this applet.
• Help - displays this document.
• Suspend laptop - Executes the command specified in the Properties dialog. This entry will be ghosted out if you haven't specified what command to run.

Customization

You can customize the Battstat applet somewhat by right-clicking on it and choose Properties.... This will bring up the preferences dialog window.

Figure 5: Preferences dialog; General

The properties are:

• Yellow: sets the battery level where the progress bar will switch from green to yellow. Default: 40.

• Orange: sets the battery level where the progress bar will switch from yellow to orange. Default: 25.

• Red: sets the battery level where the progress bar will switch from orange to red. Default: 15.

• The preview frame contains the battery progress bar and a draggable slider. By dragging the slider you can preview how it will look when the battery level actually changes. It doesn't affect the battery in any way.

• Notify me when battery charge is low: By selecting this, a warning dialog will appear when the power falls below the value in the Red entry box.

• Notify me when battery is fully re-charged: By selecting this, a dialog window will appear when the battery is fully re-charged.

• Beep when either of the above is tru: If you select this, your laptop will make an audible beep when any of the two above happens.

• Percentage text: If you click on this button, a font selection dialog window will appear. You can then select the font of your choice for the percentage text.

• Suspend command: Whatever you enter here will be executed when you click on the Suspend laptop in the applet menu. If you clear this entry field, the Suspend laptop entry will be unselectable. For example, if you are using FreeBSD you could enter apm -z or zzz here. Before you enter anything though, first make sure that you can safely suspend your laptop by testing the command in a shell.

Figure 6: Preferences dialog; Appearance

The properties on this page are:

• Move towards top: If you select this radio button, the battery charge level meter will drain towards the positive terminal on the battery. (To the left, see figure 7)
  
  Figure 7:Drain to top
• Move towards bottom: If you select this radio button, the battery charge level meter will drain towards the negative terminal on the battery. (To the right, see figure 8)
  
  Figure 8:Drain to bottom
• Horizontal: By selecting this mode the applet will have a horizontal layout. (This is the default mode).
• Square: In square mode the applet will be layout in a square formed shape. See figure 9 below.
  
  Figure 9:Square layout
• Applet Layout Here you can select which parts of the applets you want to have visible. For an example, see figure 10 and 11.

  
  Figure 10:Some parts of the applets should be hidden...
  

  
  Figure 11:...and they are.
  

• Use the status dock If you enable this toggle button the applet will use the status docklet if it is available. Figure 12 shows what it will look like.

  
  Figure 12:The status docklet
  

Sound

So, you want to make the applet a bit more noisy? Just open the GNOME Control Center and make sure that you have enabled sound support for GNOME. Then you just have to assign your desired sounds for the supported events in the Events tab. Check figure 13 below for an example of how my configuration looks like.

(If you want to use my sounds, you can get them here.)

Figure 13:Sound events selection

Bugs

Download

The latest version of the Battstat applet can always be downloaded from: http://battstat.sourceforge.net/

• Source: battstat_applet-2.0.11.tar.gz

• RPM package (installs in /usr): battstat_applet-2.0.11-1.i386.rpm

• Debian package (installs in /usr): battstat-applet_2.0.11.deb