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Monday July 18, 2005

GNOME battery status meter for Solaris x86

Casper Dik posted recently about frkit and mentioned that there was a GNOME applet for the battery status driver. I was the one that did the port of the existing GNOME battery status to the acpidrv driver that is in the frkit bundle.

You can download the frkit bundle for the gnome applet here. This contains the source and binaries, the source is hacked in and doesn't support GNU autoconf because I haven't spent the time to understand how it is supposed to work.

I've also posted the patches and request for official Solaris x86 support to the GNOME bugzilla bug# 302886. Longer term the correct way to do this is to get HAL ported over to Solaris since this benefits GNOME & KDE. I believe the Desktop community of OpenSolaris will be starting that port. Once we have that done and the real interface to the battery status is implemented we can have a much cleaner solution. In the mean time my hacked up applet will do.

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: Solaris

( Jul 18 2005, 11:06:12 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [5]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/gnome_battery_status_meter_for

Comments:

I'd argue that the "right" place to put the stats would be into a kstat.

Apart from that, I have been using the applet since Darren did the work and it certainly makes life a lot nicer knowing how much battery you have left.

Alan.

Posted by Alan Hargreaves on July 19, 2005 at 12:25 AM BST #

Agreed on the kstats as being the "right" way to expose this from the kernel to userland. However it still HAL that should read the kstats not the applet directly.

Posted by Darren Moffat on July 19, 2005 at 12:34 AM BST #

Thanks Darren (and by proxy casper who's page led me here), Works a treat on snv with gnome2.14! Exactly what I needed as I never see the tiny (badly placed) battery warning light on this laptop!

Posted by Jonathan on July 08, 2006 at 04:17 PM BST #

Hi, i tried the installing the above, using the instructions found in http://www.sun.drydog.com/faq/s86faq.html#6.48 # Extract with gzcat gnome-batery.tar.gz | tar xvf - # Install with cd gnome-battery; ./install; ./postinstall both the [pre]install scripts complained of: cp: /usr/share/omf/gnome-applets not found when i tried to add-to-panel, i received a message that the apm device cannot be opened, and questioned if i have the appropriate permissions -- i am logged in as root. Thanks for any help, it'll be great to have this functionality.

Posted by sangsuan.gam on January 21, 2007 at 01:33 PM GMT #

oh ... all is well now, after i realized i need to install the following: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/downloads/acpidrv.tar.gz happy now :-) cheers, thanks Casper and Darren for this! sam

Posted by sangsuan.gam on January 21, 2007 at 01:44 PM GMT #