Battery Status 0.1 Released - Improved Battery Applet For The Gnome Desktop

Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about laptop battery state. It comes with a lot of additional features, so usual icon of GNOME Power Manager can be removed from Notification/Indicator Area. Don't worry about the battery icon in Ubuntu being a part of the Indicator Applet, when you first add Battery Status to the panel, it will ask to remove the default battery icon (but will keep the Indicator Applet).

Gnome's Power Manager battery icon only shows the remaining battery power. But using the Battery Status applet, the user can access:

• Battery Status dialog
• Power Statistics (provided by GNOME Power Manager)
• "Show" setting
• CPU frequency scaling (provided by gnome-applets/cpufreq-applet)
• Power Management preferences (provided by GNOME Power Manager)

You can also set the icon display the remaining battery (either minutes or percentage) in the notification area. But that's not all Battery Status can do and Battery Status 0.1 has just been released so more tweaks to come! For more info, visit Battery Status webpage.

To install Battery Status in Ubuntu, simply paste this in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:iaz/battery-status && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install battery-status

Once installed, right click your Gnome panel, select "Add to panel" and then add the "Battery applet". If you're using Ubuntu Netbook Edition, the Gnome panel is locked and you cannot add/remove applets by default, but here is a fix for this: Add / Remove Gnome Panel Applets In Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04

Ubuntu users can even run the Battery Status as an indicator using the following command:

/usr/lib/battery-status/battery-status --indicator

(make sure you put this in your startup applications).

Battery Status uses GConf for settings so if you want to change anything, you can find all the settings in /apps/battery_status.

If you're not using Ubuntu, see installation instructions for Battery Status, HERE.


Update: If Battery Status says "No battery" when using it, here's a fix:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/battery-status/battery-status

Then locate the two 'BAT0' entries and replace them with 'BAT1' (without the quotes, of course).

Special thanks to bungh0l3 for this fix!