GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 670747
Pressing on Fn+F2 doesn't show remaining battery time in the OSD anymore
Last modified: 2013-01-12 21:14:30 UTC
I'm not sure if this is a feature or not but pressing Fn+F2 on my Samsung NC10 doesn't show the remaining battery time in an OSD notification as it did in Natty (GNOME 2.32.1) and earlier. Instead, that key combination opens gnome-power-statistics which isn't a very quick way to check battery status. I'm aware that the remaining battery time can be shown in the panel but I'm used to Fn+F2. This bug has also been reported here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/884038
That's what it used to do: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-power-manager/tree/src/gpm-manager.c?h=gnome-2-32#n940
We can easily add a popup with a bigger battery icon, and a gauge/fill level, but there wouldn't be room/design for any text being added.
The information in gnome-power-statistics really needs to be prioritized to be useful. At least in my system (3.2, Debian), "Time to empty" is the 18th item in the table at the second tab. The 2nd item is "Type", informing me that my laptop's battery is indeed of type "Laptop battery". Besides reorganizing this information, maybe we could add a first tab ("Overview") to display the system status in one quick look. This would fit the reported use case better, while allowing the user to investigate further if they so need.
Felipe, cleaning up gnome-power-statistics is a good idea, but we already know it's the wrong tool for the particular job at hand. We want/need to show an overview of the current battery status, so it could either be a popup akin to the volume one, or we could pop out the power menu in gnome-shell through D-Bus (and a popup with a slashed battery if there's no batteries to report about).
(In reply to comment #4) Agreed, showing gnome-power-statistics is probably too much for this particular scenario in any case. Cleaning it up should be a different issue than the one reported by this bug.
*** Bug 670056 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think having a simple OSD with the battery level indicated in an icon and the percentage indicated as text would be sufficient.
I think a osd would be fine if we have to show something. We don't show osds for a number of other fn-xyz special keys though, like fn-f7 (display config) or fn-f5 (wifi)
We've been meaning to for display config no?
What about opening up gnome-control-center power? At least on Thinkpads (which I am on right now), it would be consistent with the laptop manual and the behaviour on windows (if I am to believe the manual, I have never run windows on this thing even once).
(In reply to comment #9) > We've been meaning to for display config no? I even wrote a complete implementation of it. Then federico took it over, and wrote another complete implementation of it. But it never landed :-(
Implemented in master, thanks to Cosimo's work on the OSD itself.