How do I configure battery management for Salix Ratpoison?

[rrttdd]

Hi,

I few days ago I was called and left my Salix laptop alone (battery operated). When I left I first thought that I would be back in a few minutes. But in the end, I needed several hours.

When I came back, the laptop was off. I tried to restart it without power supply and battery operated. I was used to Windows, which always leaves about 5-7% of the battery's capacity when shutting down. But I was unable to start the laptop. So I connected it with the power supply and booted up Windows.

In Windows, the task bar tool showed a battery capacity of 0% remaining! As far as I know this is quite concerning, since the usual laptop battery should not run completely empty!

So I want to find a way to prevent that 'it's empty when it's empty" behaviour of the Salix power management in the future. How can I configure Salix to shut down earlier and leave a little rest of battery power?

[gapan]

I had a complete solution for that once, but unfortunately I lost it all due to a broken hard drive. How good are you with shell scripting? The idea is to read the output of /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state to get the remaining capacity, read the output of /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info to get the design capacity, do the math (percent = 100*remaining/design) and create a cronjob that will run every few minutes that checks that percentage. I had set it up so that if it was <20%, I would get a ratpoison message at the top right that battery was low and if it was <5%, it would shut down gracefully. Even if you know only a little bit of scripting it might be a good exercise to do it. It could be that there are ready made solutions for something like that out there, but I'm not aware of them.

[mimosa]

Sounds like a fun project. Not relevant to the specific problem, but xbattbar-acpi is in the 14.1 repositories. It shouldn't be too hard to build it and its (two) dependencies for 14.0; on the other hand, I think if you search the forums you should find links to packages for 14.0.

However, it has no early warning system ... just a constant graphical reminder of the level.