Fluxbox Laptop Battery Charge Meter

[flash3780]

Hello everyone. I've been tooling around with Fedora with the Fluxbox environment on my old Dell 400SD4 laptop and it works fantastic. I'm still getting a feel for the environment, but one major concern that I had was a battery meter. Being a laptop, it's important to know when I'm almost out of juice.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a battery meter for Fluxbox? Preferably one that can be installed through the yum repositories?

Thanks for the help.

[bonedome]

Hello
I use gnome-power-manger, add it to your ~/fluxbox/startup file, here's mine

conky & gnome-volume-control-applet & nm-applet & gnome-power-manager &  synclient TapButton1=1 & synclient VertEdgeScroll=1 & /usr/libexec/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 & exec /usr/bin/fluxbox

just out of interest does tapping and edge scrolling work out of the box for you ?

[bodhi.zazen]

Alternately , use xfce4-power-manager, might be a bit lighter then the gnome applet.

http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/app...-power-manager

[flash3780]

Originally Posted by bonedome

Hello
I use gnome-power-manger, add it to your ~/fluxbox/startup file, here's mine

conky & gnome-volume-control-applet & nm-applet & gnome-power-manager &  synclient TapButton1=1 & synclient VertEdgeScroll=1 & /usr/libexec/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 & exec /usr/bin/fluxbox

just out of interest does tapping and edge scrolling work out of the box for you ?

Thanks, I'll try that. Just getting started, so figuring stuff out should come a bit easier when I become a bit more comfortable with it.

No, I get bupkis when it comes to tapping and edge-scrolling. There are still quite a few things that I need to figure out, so I can't tell you if it's me or if fluxbox doesn't support those features. Still, it's fast... really fast.

I think that it will probably suit me fine if I can figure out how to do a few things. It seems like there isn't anything installed by default, so you only load the features that you want. That's kind of nice.

---------- Post added at 07:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:27 PM ----------

Yep, that worked great. Thanks. Also set me up with a volume control and networkmanager. I thought that I'd be stuck using alsamixer from here on out.

---------- Post added at 07:34 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:29 PM ----------

Originally Posted by bodhi.zazen

Alternately , use xfce4-power-manager, might be a bit lighter then the gnome applet.

http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/app...-power-manager

Good point... I wonder what the savings might be, though. It'd be hard to say for sure which one is truly lighter without doing a comparison, I suppose.

---------- Post added at 07:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:34 PM ----------

Hmm... well never mind what I said earlier. Side-scrolling and tapping seems to work ok. I'm not sure what I did differently...

---------- Post added at 07:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:49 PM ----------

Oh, duh... the script that you gave me had an edge-scrolling and tapbutton application. I get it now.

[bonedome]

Hello
I wrote a basic fluxbox guide here http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...=fluxbox+guide obviously you'll have to set up the menu etc to your own preferences

[flash3780]

Originally Posted by bonedome

Hello
I wrote a basic fluxbox guide here http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...=fluxbox+guide obviously you'll have to set up the menu etc to your own preferences

Wow, you just made my awesome list for today. Thank you so much for this. I'm still tooling around to get things set up to my liking, but I'm really happy with fluxbox so far. It's zippy.

My laptop was struggling with Gnome 2, so I've been dreading going to Gnome 3. I'm thinking that this might be a better option.

[flash3780]

This is sort of an old thread, but I recently installed Fluxbox on my new (to me) laptop, Lappy II. Lappy popped a solder joint in the power jack that I wasn't able to fix... and was retired. Poor Lappy.

Anyhew, everything works great, but the icons for the new gnome-power-manager and gnome-sound-applet are... erm... black. Which is strange, because they're gray in Gnome 3. The new icons are sleek, but not very visible (when they're black) for on dark desktop theme in Fluxbox. Is there any way to change the icons in the system tray (or at least invert their color)?

It's not a huge issue... but it does make things difficult to see with a dark backdrop.

[OTPABA]

Hi all,

since Gnome v2 is not available any more by default, and my desktop must have 10 static workspaces (hard to change habits after 12 years) I switched to Fluxbox and obviously felt lack for some features. After my laptop died few times due to battery discharge I just spent few minutes to code a primitive but helpful status-bar battery icon. Works for me...

It is written in perl. It does not use native ACPI support. I simply used /usr/bin/acpi output instead (make sure you install acpi package before: yum install acpi). Icon will show you 100%, 75%, 50%, 25% changes. It turns full-red and starts blinking when battery is bellow 10%. When hovered you can see pop-up label like:

"Battery 0: Charging, 11%, 03:15:21 until charged"

It gets updated every 30 seconds. I used embedded / base64 encoded icon images to avoid dependencies. In my case I installed it under ~/scripts/baterryIcon.pl with 0755 (-rwxr-xr-x) permissions. It gets started by ~/.fluxbox/startup with a line:

~/scripts/baterryIcon.pl &

I'll be glad if you try it. I'll be happy if you like it Feel free to modify it if you need.

Generally it does not try to write anything to your system at all, so it should be safe to run, but please use it on your own risk and be aware of the following:

CAUTIONS:
- never tested on systems others than Fedora 15;
- never tested on a desktop computer without battery;
- never tested on a laptop with more than one battery;
- never tested on a different Window Manager than Fluxbox v1.3.2