Today, a package was delivered to my house containing an item which I’ve been missing for a long time, years in fact. A second battery for my laptop. I’ve been working on various power management solutions in KDE in the past years, and they all had one problem: I couldn’t really test if everything worked with more than one battery plugged in. In that area, I always depended on others to help me debugging and fixing problems, not the ideal workflow, so some bugs have gone uncaught in the past.
Not anymore! Now I’ve got this second battery in the optical drive slot of my dear Thinkpad T60, I can immediately identify problems with displaying the charge rate of more than one battery, and I did. One bug displaying a wrongly formatted translation string in the battery’s popup has already bitten the dust, within one hour of delivery of the second battery, I committed a patch to the 4.4 branch and trunk of KDE SC. As far as I can see, showing the charge rate of multiple batteries basically works. I’ll probably find more room for improvement as I use this new setup, but for now, rejoice!
So up until now, the solution was… ?
Change something, wait for bugreports, write patch, wait for testing, rinse, repeat. I can now do this whole cycle a lot quicker (basically I can test my own code :)), I assume that will result in this feature working better.
Hi there,
I just wanted to ask if it is possible to add a estimation about how long the battery is going to be sufficient. I really miss this feature but I don’t have any idea how complicate it is to implement that. But I think Gnome already has this feature…? Perhaps you can tell me about that?
That feature is already there, but it’s a hidden config option since the time estimation you get is never reliable.
http://vizzzion.org/blog/2009/11/battery-improvements-in-kde-plasma-4-4/
Will it scale to more than two batteries as well?
Supposedly, if it works for two, it’ll work for more than two as well. Not that I’ve ever seen hardware like that …
Thank you indeed!
This is most appreciated! :)
as a previous bug reporter, I sure am happy you can now test yourself! =) last week I wondered if you take a weighted mean of the 2 batteries when showing 1 number.. do you? :) because I thought I got a bit of a weird value
mattie: not yet, but as my batteries vary in capacity, it’s probably what we’ll be doing.
Hi, there is a problem with the drop down widget for the power profiles. If you click on it, at part of the drop down list will be behind the panel, so e.g. the last entry in the list is not visible, which makes it impossible to select with the mouse. You can only move the selection down with the courser key. Could you fix this for 4.4 as well, please?
@Christian: Please don’t mistake my blog as a bug tracker, instead go to bugs.kde.org and file a bug where it does *not* get lost
The bug you’re experiencing has two causes: (1) Too many default profiles, we should not have more than two — save power or don’t (I’ve been meaning to clean this up forever), and (2) a layering problem in Plasma / QGraphicsView
@Sebas: I was not planning to abuse your blog as a bug system, don’t worry.
Thank you anyways for your work on this widget and KDE itself.
Oh, I meant if you wanted to see the status of both batteries in KDE.
I guess this will take away a day of work at Tokamak, isn’t it? :)
Hi, I really like that purplish wallpaper, thats the only reason i readed this post, can you please say what wallpaper is it? Thank you
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. You’ll have to read more posts of mine (future ones), and I might give it away. Some day. Maybe. ;-)
Well if you will not say what wallpaper you are using then i will switch to GNOME. How about that? I’m pretty sure that you don’t want to lose one more KDE user :]
That won’t be a problem. The wallpaper is probably fully GNOME-compatible. :)
What is the wallpaper you are using in that screenshot? I readed the whole post just because i want that wallpaper. Thank you.
Hey! That’s great news… My laptop’s going to use this extensively and… I really like it. However, I’ve been asking here and there without any real help ’round… about UPS support. We’ve got NUT (http://www.networkupstools.org/), which is nice, cool and has all the monitoring we need. However, it lacks slick support in KDE. Since I cannot do it myself, I’ll try here… at least to get some opinion. Is there any plan for including UPS support in KDE (for the desktop users).. and power profiles.. for battery saving purposes?
I don’t have any plans for that right now.
It’s outside the scope of the battery applet, since laptops don’t usually have a UPS (well, not a real one, anyway).
Hey sebas have you ever considered using one icon for the task tray/widget, but showing all battery info in the popup/tooltip?
Most of the time I just want to see how much battery I have left, I don’t care about the individual batteries, if I do I am willing to take the time to mouse over or click on the widget. Just something to consider.
Thanks!
Yes, in fact just yesterday I thought that that might be a better idea. We can probably get rid of the config option that way as well. I’ve some (internal) relayouting planned anyway, so I might pick this up then.