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.
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Device information dialog (which has been totaly deprecated in last versions) from mate-power-manager's icon has been replaced by battery status dialog in Battery Status.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.
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
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)
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.
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