Thursday, October 3, 2013

Manjaro / Arch Power management - Battery monitor - hybernation

Problem:
The battery monitor that came with Manjaro doesn't inform me when I'm running out of juice and my computer will just shut off without warning.

Hibernation also seems does nothing, just makes it harder to boot back up.

Fixes:
I played around with tint2 using tintwizard and other peoples shared tint2rc config files as a guide and found adding the following to my tint2rc file added battery status to the system tray, but I was still not seeing notifications that the battery was down.

# Battery
battery = 1
battery_low_status = 20
battery_low_cmd = notify-send "battery low"
battery_hide = 0
bat1_font = Sans 6
bat2_font = sans 6
battery_font_color = #FFFFFF 65
battery_padding = 3 1
battery_background_id = 1

As it turns out, the notification was just too dark and disappeared to quickly for me to notice it.

One solution to this was to change tintrc to increase the timeout of the notification and add an icon to make it more visible:

# Battery
battery = 1
battery_low_status = 25
battery_low_cmd = notify-send -t 600000 "WARNING:" "Battery Critically Low!" --icon=battery-low
battery_hide = 0
bat1_font = Sans 6
bat2_font = sans 6
battery_font_color = #FFFFFF 65
battery_padding = 3 1
battery_background_id = 1

Another option would be to change the default setting of all notifications to be more visible by going to Settings --> Notifications and bumping up the time a which notifications will disappear and
and choosing the Theme: "ZOMG-PONIES!"

I did both.

Another fix worth mentioning is a program to extend battery life.  The Arch user Spatry who does the how-to videos recommended I try Jupiter.  It wasn't part of the normal Manjaro build so I had to install it from AUR:

yaourt -S jupiter

After that, it appeared I needed a way to start it upon bootup in Openbox.  While searching how to auto-start on Manjaro I came across a post recommending the program ob-autostart, which also had to be installed via AUR:

yaourt -S ob-autostart

After that one just launches ob-autostart and creates a shortcut to launch Jupiter.





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