Battlow

The battlow package contains programs which are useful for battery watching on Linux systems, in particular for automatically shutting down the system if the battery state is too low. If your computer has neither /proc/acpi/battery nor /sys/class/power_supply, or there isn't at least one battery subdirectory, don't bother with this package. The software is mainly intended for Linux systems based on the Debian distribution but may also work on other Linux systems.

The key point of this package is that, in contrast to other solutions I have seen, this one is not based on desktop programs (which do not work if no one is logged in or if the person currently logged in has not started them) but is implemented as a daemon which will be running always. I find this a more appropriate response to a condition which affects the system as a whole, although, admittedly, with modern well-designed file systems a power failure is usually not as catastrophic as it could have been in the past.

The programs in this package are:

• xbattwatch is a simple X Window application showing the current relative capacity of a battery. Here is how it can look like if the capacity is at the warning level but not yet low:
  
  
  
  The background colour will change to green if the battery capacity increases through the warning threshold, and to red if it decreases through the low threshold.
• battlowd is a daemon regularly checking the state of all batteries. If a significant event occurs (e.g., the battery's capacity drops below the low threshold), the daemon can either generate a suitable user notification or pass an event description to an external program. If the daemon is configured to handle events itself, it can also initiate a shutdown if battery capacity is critically low.

All commands are distributed with manual pages.

This software is released under the GNU GPL, version 2, and can be found in the directory http://home.vrweb.de/martin.lottermoser/battlow/dist. The package is distributed as a gzipped tar archive (battlow-version.tar.gz) accompanied by a digital signature (battlow-version.tar.gz.sign).

For older versions of this package, I had also distributed a Debian source package variant (battlow_version.dsc.gz (apply gunzip first) and battlow_version.tar.gz). Newer versions permit the generation of a Debian package or an RPM package from the tar archive.

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