Battery monitor for LXDE in Arch Linux

Question

I have Arch Linux plus LXDE installed in my laptop. I want to know the status of the battery level. I tried to install batterymon, but got too many errors that I couldn't decipher.

Is there any other way to monitor the battery level?

Answer 1

There are any number of tools to monitor your battery's state: you could install something like conky to display it on your desktop, or you could use ACPI, as described in the Arch Wiki.

The real issue you have is that if you do not understand, or are unwilling to try to resolve, the error messages when installing a simple application, then you are going to encounter far more difficult issues running Arch.

Answer 2

The easiest way to get it is through acpi command as follows (note acpi may not be installed by default so use apt-get or yum command to install the same):

$ acpi -V

or from the /proc fs

[root@centos ~]# cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/*
alarm:                   unsupported
present:                 yes
design capacity:         50000 mWh
last full capacity:      50000 mWh
battery technology:      rechargeable
design voltage:          10000 mV
design capacity warning: 100 mWh
design capacity low:     50 mWh
capacity granularity 1:  1 mWh
capacity granularity 2:  1 mWh
model number:            1
serial number:           0
battery type:            VBOX
OEM info:                innotek
present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          charged
present rate:            0 mW
remaining capacity:      50000 mWh
present voltage:         10000 mV
[root@centos ~]# 

Aside, I found this bug link which says lxpanel has got problems on Fedora with ACPI stack and it mucks the states. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=561311

There is another utility on sourceforge.net called webattery , perhaps worth a try. and another one jupiterapp, a tray app http://www.jupiterapplet.org/

Answer 3

try installing acpi, and running acpi -b :)

then you can put the data directly to the conky or something, using: acpi -b | sed -r 's/.*([0-9]{2,3}%).*/\1/'