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Topic: Battery, How to monitor battery

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borgward

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Posts: 23
Joined: April 2005

Posted: May 11 2008,19:57

How to I monitor laptop battery charge level from the desktop? I had been running CENTOS on this old Dell CPi and decided to try DSL to see if worked better w/a slow machine. CentOS had a little Icon in the system tray to alert me of the battery charge status.

^thehatsrule^ Offline

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Joined: July 2006

Posted: May 11 2008,22:55

You could use the included torsmo for monitoring it.

Juanito

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Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: May 12 2008,03:46

..or there are a couple of dock apps in mydsl here.

JPsDad

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Joined: April 2005

Posted: Sep. 10 2008,02:44

Quote (^thehatsrule^ @ May 11 2008,19:55)

You could use the included torsmo for monitoring it.

Could you explain to a DSL Dummy how to do that?
I have torsmo running (by default) on my frugal install of v. 4.4.3. It does not say anything about bat or AC. on my Centrino laptop. An older version on an old tower does tell me it is on AC. How do I setup this configuration?
Can I also throttle my CPU (Pent.M 1.6M) down to 600 when I am on battery

I did a search and this was the nearest hit to helping me.
Thanks for your help
John

Juanito

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Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: Sep. 10 2008,03:51

The default torsmo configuration file - /home/dsl/.torsmorc - should contain a line that displays either "ac" or battery data. I think this is set to display acpi information by default.

Do you know if your laptop uses "apm" or "acpi" power management? If it uses apm, then the .torsmorc file can probably be modified to suit - see the comments in .torsmorc or on the torsmo man pages on-line.

If you have a pentium m processor, you should be able to use the "powerstep" feature as well as/instead of throttling. If I remember correctly, the acpid mydsl extension has a script to change the powerstep setting when the power is disconnected.

To check if you can change the powerstep and/or throttling settings manually, you need to look in (for example) /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance - if there is something there, you can change it by:

Code Sample

$ sudo echo x > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance

where "x" is 1 to 7 on my machine.

5 replies since May 11 2008,19:57

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