Wmacpiload
by Alan Carriou (carriou_alan AT yahoo.fr)
September 30th: wmacpiload 0.2.0 released !
As written in the NEWS file, most changes are hunder the hood and will not be seen
by the users.
Still, you will note that is uses even less CPU than before !
And I have added a -D command-line option to disable battery management
Feel free to use it !
August 12th: links to old versions fixed. Mea culpa
July 23rd, 2005: big news ! (After quite a long time without activity on this page...)
- With Anthony's agreement, I am now the maintainer of wmacpiload.
- This page has got a light lifting, and moved to tuxfamily.org
(as the old page was on my ISP webspace and I'm done with them);
- And version 0.2.0 is coming soon...
August 19th, 2004: patch 4 released ! Changes:
- lowered CPU usage;
- the documentation is (at least ;) up-to-date;
- and a few other things...
wmacpiload
is a dockapp for GNU/Linux that monitors
ACPI status, meaning temperature, battery status and AC adapter status,
in a nice graphical display. It has an LCD look-alike user
interface, and is supported by X window managers such as Window Maker,
AfterStep, BlackBox, and Enlightenment.
wmacpiload
was created by Anthony Peacock (bratag44 AT hotmail.com), and was indeed
a good dockapp, which did what it was asked to, and looked nice, so I used it.
But it wasn't perfect (hey, version 0.1.2 at the time), and there had been some talk
on dockapps.org about how to
improve it; but Anthony did not have enough time to work it out.
So I put myself to it, and made my patch (among many others). I had proposed it to
Anthony, but he couldn't review it; so I released it here. With time, my patch grew
and grew (four releases in a chaotic scheduling), adding features and fixing stuff.
Meanwhile, Anthony having no more time to maintain wmacpiload, he and I agreed that
I would became the maintainer (thanks ;) ). So, my patch is now the official
wmacpiload...
wmacpiload
has been tested and/or reported to work on many 2.4.x
and 2.6.x Linux kernels; and it does the following things (among others):
- Auto-detection at run-time of the acpi devices' real names (i.e. no hard-coded
device names).
- Detection of (I hope) all battery slots, thermal sensors, and AC adapters...
The code isn't limited to 2, 8 or whatever number of devices: it just looks for them
until there is either no more devices left, or no more memory left...
- The app still monitors only one temperature sensor and one battery at a time,
but the user can swap between the different temperature sensors with a middle click,
and a right-click for batteries.
- The on-line icon is displayed when at least one AC adapter is on-line (could be useful
when a laptop is plugged in a docking station).
- Live detection of batteries being plugged in and out.
- A command-line option to get debug messages, to know if (or how far) this damn
thing works.
- and all this with low CPU usage (I hope)
See the files NEWS
and ChangeLog
for more accurate info.
Generic source
Everyone can freely download wmacpiload as a source tarball right here:
You can check the MD5 sum it by typing, for instance,
md5sum wmacpiload-0.2.0.tar.bz2 within a shell and comparing the result
with the MD5 given above.
See INSTALL
for compiling and installing steps.
Distribution-specific
Gentoo users can use the ebuild made by Eric Olinger (thanks ;).
My work has been quite irregular on this patch... So there are some things I
haven't done/fixed/tested yet :
- Although the app can display the information given by any, say, thermal sensor
one after the other (with that middle-click), the user cannot know which sensor
is being monitorer through the GUI; to know that, he has to activate debug messages...
which is quite not the aim of a dockapp. As i don't yet know much about coding WM popups,
menus and stuff, i'll need time and/or help to complete it.
- It has been tested only on few machines under linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels. It
means that, if anyone can report of this dockapp working on another hardware/kernel,
it would be very helpful. And, if anyone can help with other OSes (*BSD or anything), that would be just great.
- Especially, I do not know how it would work under a system with several ac adapters,
so anyone with a laptop and docking station, please leave a note ;)
You can also check the TODO
file for this kind of info.
Whatever it works or it doesn't, please tell me. If it does, it is always nice to know it ;). If it does not work, give me the model of your computer, and, what i'd need to do something about it is this:
- wmacpiload's output : this patch defines a command-line option to make
it a bit verbose. Type wmacpiload -v within a shell to test it. The app
will then tell something useful (or not);
- the output of find /proc/acpi;
- the kernel version (ouput of uname -a);
- and any file content or information you think is relevant (like a
state
file related to an undetected device).
For instance, on my machine:
- "wmacpiload -V" tells me:
Battery slot C11B found ; battery is plugged out
Battery slot C11C found ; battery is plugged in
AC adapter C11A found
Thermal zone TZ3 found
Thermal zone TZ2 found
Thermal zone TZ1 found
Monitoring thermal zone TZ3 and battery C11B.
- find /proc/acpi tells me something like:
/proc/acpi/
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ3
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ3/polling_frequency
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ3/cooling_mode
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ3/trip_points
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ3/temperature
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ3/state
/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ2
(...)
/proc/acpi/battery
/proc/acpi/battery/C11B
/proc/acpi/battery/C11B/alarm
/proc/acpi/battery/C11B/state
/proc/acpi/battery/C11B/info
/proc/acpi/battery/C11C
(...)
/proc/acpi/ac_adapter/C11A/state
(...)
dockapps.org a page on dockapps.org about wmacpiload