GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 300642
Gnome Battery Applet alarm appears too soon. No way to change it.
Last modified: 2005-06-10 08:22:48 UTC
This bug has been opened here: https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/9193 "The alarm in Gnome Battery Applet appears too soon. It advises me at 15%, but my battery almost last 30minutes since these alarm. There is no way to change it, and I forgot to plug the CA."
You can fiddle with the key: /apps/panel/applets/applet_1/prefs/red_value in GConf to edit this value. Perhaps we should teach it to use a value learnt from ACPI, I will chat with Matthew Garrett as to whether "design capacity warning" is a suitable field to use.
It should have a graphic way of changing this. (It had in Gnome 2.8, didn't it? I think, there should be a way to change every state-color mark and the possibility to choose an alarm in every state-color change. For example, I would like to have a 15% alarm, and a 1% or 2% alarm.
There was a GUI interface in GNOME 2.8. It was removed as part of the interface cleanup because it was damned confusing and not a clearly useful option. The idea is to automatically learn the information we need to.
Davyd: I think we might want to re-add a preference. There's no way to learn how much of a warning the user wants (some might want 15, others 5.) [X] Warn me when battery charge drops to: [ 30 ]I [ Percent v ] | Minutes Remaining | That's a vague attempt at ascii art for a spinbox and a combobox :) I'd be happy to code this up.
We do know about 'design capacity warning' (mine is 907 mWh, which is 2%). I'm not sure if this is supported on all ACPI implementations, or how it varies, but it does exist. Incidently this is also the point when the battery warning light on the front of my machine starts to flash. Perhaps we can use this for something useful. The dropdown dialog definitely sounds like a useful thing to have, precalculating the 'orange zone' from that would be fun. Thoughts?
I had change the /apps/panel/applets/battstat_screen0/prefs/red_value but it seems that is only used to draw the icon, but not as criteria to change the message. By default it was set to 15 showing a warning when still remained 45 minutes. So, I changed that value to 4. I was expecting the message when remain 12 minutes, but it was shown when remain 45 minutes. Obviously, with 45 minutes remaining I don't care about the power, but it's annoying when the laptop is powered off because there is no more energy because you forgot it. I'm using Ubuntu Hoary, with 2.10.1.
Ups. Sorry, my fault. I was checking the code and it uses the red_value as condition. I didn't notice that it was necessary to restart the battery applet to get the changes applied.
Davyd: the idea of orangezone/redzone and "when to give warning" aren't necessarily the same thing. Ideally, the option would just allow you to choose when the warning is given, with no side effects. If we did have it adjust the colour levels, then we could use it to adjust the red level directly and have the new orange value based on that using some strange calculation. orange = red * 2 seems sane as long as the user doesn't do something like set their red value to 50%.
2005-06-10 Davyd Madeley <davyd@madeley.id.au> * battstat.h: * battstat.schemas.in: * battstat_applet.c: * battstat_applet.glade: * properties.c: Low battery warning can now be dependant on time remaining or percentage remaining, with the warning amount being configurable in the UI. Orange/Yellow values have been dropped from GConf and are now being autocalculated (multipliers in battstat.h)