KThinkBat

Description

KThinkBat is a laptop battery monitor for the KDE-Kicker. It is inspired by the Windows Application "Battery Maximizer" which is included with ThinkPads.

On ThinkPads it uses the SMAPI BIOS through the tp_smapi driver. It shows you the current power consumption of the laptop and brings support for a second battery. It is fully customizable including sizes, color, fonts and battery number

Homepage: https://lepetitfou.dyndns.org/KThinkBat

Author: Tobias Roeser

Latest Version (2006/02/04): 0.1.5

Screenshot

Offline Mode: you see how much charge is left and the current discharging rate.

Online Mode: you see how much charge is left and the current charging rate. This screenshot is taken with the disabled "summarize batteries" option.

Installation

KThinkBat uses the autotools. For a standard installation use

./configure
make
su -c 'make install'

Alternatively, to minimize filesystem clutter you can install KThinkBat into /opt/kthinkbat and add just a few symlinks under /usr:

mkdir -p /opt/kthinkbat
./configure --prefix=/opt/kthinkbat
make
make install
cd /usr/lib/kde3
ls -vs ../../../opt/kthinkbat/lib/* ./
cd /usr/share/apps/kicker/applets
ln -vs ../../../../../opt/kthinkbat/share/apps/kicker/applets/kthinkbat.desktop ./

(The above paths are for Fedora 4, and may need to be adjusted for other distributions.)

Gentoo

You can use the the ebuild from this portage overlay, category/package: app-laptop/kthinkbat.

Download

• Download from the KThinkBat Site

Model Specific Notes

• T20 - 0.1.5 appears to work but did not display a second battery even when one was present at system boot and is found by ACPI. This may be because KThinkBat doesn't use tp_smapi, but information is easily obtained from ACPI as an alternative. ( cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state )

See Also

• How to use UltraBay batteries