I need a battery indicator for my laptop.

[contraversy]

Hello,

What can I install (or if the live dvd came with anything) to be able to see my laptops battery percentages?

[eccerr0r]

For Gnome, the default install includes gnome-power-manager, which when set right, puts an icon with charge state on your bar.

For CLI, acpitool in sys-power/acpitool will also report battery state.

[DaggyStyle]

Hello,

What can I install (or if the live dvd came with anything) to be able to see my laptops battery percentages?

almost all DEs has battery monitor, we need to know what DE are you using.

[contraversy]

I am using KDE, I am running a fresh install where I copied the live dvd to my system, (not a net-install or minimal install)

acpitool output:

Code: Select all

acpitool
  Battery status : <not available>
  AC adapter     : <info not available or off-line> 
  Thermal info   : <not available>

[eccerr0r]

This would imply your kernel does not have ACPI battery support or you don't have the modules inserted. I tend to compile ACPI into the kernel as it seems to be fairly important to a lot of machines (for the "C" of ACPI).

First off before we go off track: what brand/model machine are we dealing with?

I only have worked with PC/x86/x86_64 ACPI BIOS which works correctly for most modern machines. All other systems, I have no clue... The "other" systems includes laptops whose ACPI BIOS/DSDT are programmed incorrectly and Linux's ACPI interpreter breaks on their firmware...

[contraversy]

Hey I didn't think of that, I can re build it with ACPI enabled.

*edit*

Rebuilt kernel with ACPI modules, working as expected! Thanks

[eccerr0r]

Great!

Yeah it's unfortunate, the ACPI interpreter adds one heck of a lot of bloat to the kernel (did you notice your kernel size blow up?) It's huge... But I need it anyway for the "C" or Configuration part. Most newer machines with multicore or multithread require ACPI for Linux to use them anyway, and there are other stuff...