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An extended battery status applet for the MATE desktop environment. Replaces MATE Power Manager icon.

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mate-battery-status

Battery Applet/Indicator for MATE Power Management

MATE Battery Status is a project for MATE that shows information about the laptop battery state. It has some additional features, so the usual mate-power-manager icon can be removed from notification/indicator area. Battery Status doesn't rely on mate-power-manager directly, but counts on its presence in the system for useful integration with it.

Rationale

mate-power-manager's icon has got a user interface shortcoming (if its purpose - to show battery information) - for see exactly battery percentage or battery lifetime, user should hover mouse to icon, wait couple seconds, and only then user could see required information (tooltip - the bad way for getting information in such cases). Such behavior pretty annoying, so Battery Status' applet hasn't got such behavior and allow to user see percentage/lifetime/charge time of battery right in panel next to icon. Also, using mate-power-manager's icon, user can't direct place, where exactly battery information should be showing.

/!\ Problems, which has been described above, can be solved by using battstat-applet (Battery Charge Monitor applet), but it has some historical architectural disadventages (such as relies on ACPI and HAL) and user interface problems (such as using non-consistent icons) itself, and by these reasons this applet has been declared as obsolete, has been deprecated and removed from set of standard gnome-applets package in such key GNOME Desktop GNU/Linux distributions as Fedora and Ubuntu.

Another impovement - warning message about critical battery charge. mate-power-manager supports notifications (via notification-daemon/notify-osd), and this is very useful. But when user is deep in thoughts about his current work/task/action/etc, his locus of attention may just couldn't see notification-like warning about critical low (which very important if user hasn't get access for power) - it should be message on top of all windows.

Device information dialog (which has been totaly deprecated in last versions) from mate-power-manager's icon has been replaced by battery status dialog in Battery Status. In "Device Information" dialog all battery information puts in one non-human-readable heap and this dialog doesn't meet MATE HIG requirements partially, but in "Battery Status" dialog battery information divided by two easy-readable areas - one for battery capacity, and another for battery charge.

Installation

Battery Status can be installed from package, or from sources. For better experience you should re-login after installation. Command for installation from sources: python setup.py install

Basic Usage

After adding the applet to the panel, by default it shows the icon only. From main menu user (by default) can get access to:

  • Battery Status dialog
  • Power Statistics (provided by mate-power-manager)
  • Show setting
  • Text Size setting
  • CPU frequency scaling (provided by cpufreq-applet)
  • Power Management preferences (provided by mate-power-manager)

From context menu (by clicking right mouse button at applet) user can get access to:

  • Bug Reporting (apport/launchpad integration)
  • MATE Power Management help
  • About information dialog
  • generic applet-related options (such as Remove, Move, Lock To Panel)

Additional settings

Battery Applet uses MateConf for settings. All keys can be found in /apps/battery_status. Description for each key you can find using mateconf-editor.

Technical Details

Battery Status written in Python using:

  • PyGTK - python bindings to GTK library
  • python-appindicator - python bindings to AppIndicator library
  • MateComponent - for integration application in MATE panel as applet
  • MateConf - for keep and manage applet settings
  • UPower/DeviceKit-power - for getting power information
  • D-Bus - for getting power information from DeviceKit-power and update it on changes

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An extended battery status applet for the MATE desktop environment. Replaces MATE Power Manager icon.

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