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 --sample-rate option specifies the number of times the
battery is sampled every minute - the default is 20, and the maximum
value is 600. Since -s 600 translates to sampling every 0.1 seconds,
you really don't want to 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@himi.org>
Simon Fowler, 2007-07-13.
