For install instructions, see "INSTALL" file. Usage: +-------------+ |battery graph| <- visual percentage battery remaining |[:][=] [100%]| <- [:] - on AC (blink when charging) [=] - on battery |[00:00] [bX]| <- [00:00] time remaining [bX] battery being monitored. |status area| <- messages scroll here +-------------+ see wmacpi -h for some command line switches ********************************************************************** wmacpi is a dockapp ACPI battery monitor for modern kernels (ie, 2.4.17 or later, and 2.6 kernels). Basically, it opens various files under /proc/acpi, reads status information from them, and then displays summaries. Version 1.99 and later provides full support for multiple batteries. You can tell it to monitor a particular battery with the -m option, which will display the percentage remaining and current status message for that battery. The time remaining and AC/battery status are global - the time remaining is calculated based on all batteries found on the system. When charging, the time displayed is the time remaining until the battery is fully charged - this only works sensibly if your ACPI system is implemented properly (far, far too many laptops have buggered ACPI implementations). The displayed time is averaged over 50 samples, each taken every three seconds (by default). This greatly improves the accuracy of the numbers - on my laptop, the time remaining seems to be overstated by a good hour or so if you only sample once compared to fifty times. Some ACPI implementations are stupid enough to block interrupts while reading status information from the battery over a slow bus - this means that on such b0rken laptops, running an ACPI battery monitor could affect interactivity. To provide a workaround for this, current versions of wmacpi supports setting the sample rate from the command line. The default -s setting is 100, which translates to once every three seconds. -s 10 will sample every 30 seconds, -s 1 every 300 seconds. -s 1000 will sample every 0.3 seconds - don't do that unless you're just having fun . . . Also provided is a command line tool to report the battery status. By default this will only sample once, but with the -a option you can specify a number. Be aware that it will try to take all those samples in the space of one second, so if your ACPI implementation is b0rken this could have adverse effects. Please report bugs to . Simon Fowler, 2003-11-23.