asapm is Power Management (APM / ACPI) monitor utility for X Windows Copyright (c) 1998-2005 Albert "Tigr" Dorofeev For the updates check http://www.tigr.net/ Description: ============ This is an AfterStep look & feel Power Management (APM and ACPI) monitor for laptops and notebook PCs running Linux or FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD and X Windows. I have a laptop myself and I ran xapm when I used fvwm window manager. Then I switched over to AfterStep which looks really beautiful. (see http://www.afterstep.org/). I wanted some nice applet to put it in my Wharf. Well, to make the story short, I did not find any that I liked. The best bet was then to write my own. So, I just grabbed a X book and tried. The interface evolved with the time and I am finally beginning to like the way it looks. I may stop writing new versions for a while now. Let me know if there are any neat options you'd like to see though. Basically, the tool shows you the following: - The bar-like indicator of the charge left in the battery which appears on the left side and is battery-shaped. The bottom part shows the charge left in the battery. The colors may be customized. - The top line works as a pair of indicators. You see there a battery outline which is "green" when the battery status is high, "yellow" when the battery status is low, and "red" when the battery status is critical. The colors may be customized. The definition of the high, low, critical status may be mine :-) or APM daemon's - you can choose. The AC plug outline is black while you run the computer on the battery and it turns "green" when your computer is connected to the mains. The AC plug turns to red while the battery is charging. - The second line is the charge left in the battery in percent. If the APM daemon does not return a good value for it, the display is disabled. - The third line is the estimate of the time left before the complete discharge of the battery. This estimate is either provided by the APM daemon or is calculated by this tool itself. When there is no estimate available the display is disabled. When using ACPI and charging the battery, this display may show how long it is left until full charge. The tool parses the resource files if such are available and you can specify certain commands to be executed in reaction to certain APM events. For example, you may use hdparm (8) to change the timeouts for the hard disk spin-down when you switch to/from the AC power. Just be careful with that tool, okay? You can also ask asapm to suspend the computer when the power reaches down to, say, 10% (use apm (1)) in case you forget to shut down your computer and go to sleep (talking from my own experience here :-). The default location for the resource file ~/.asapmrc (what a surprise!) and can be changed with -rc option. Actually, there are more customization options then I personally want. There are tons of them. Check the man page for the details (nroff -man asapm.man | more) or run asapm -h for a brief description. The syntax of the asapm resource file is described in there too. The program may be used directly or in the Afterstep "wharf". It also supports the WindowMaker docker (-withdrawn option). It may be used in all other window managers as well. I tried it with fvwm2 and it looks quite nice sitting in a corner as an icon. You may want to have a look in the CHANGES file for the history of updates. Credits: ======== Great many thanks to Jim Knoble Brett Taylor Brian Handy John Schweitzer Dagmar d'Surreal Johnny C. Lam Brian Joseph Czapiga (Joe) Avatar Tai-hwa Liang Robert Clare Stephen Crane Bernd Sieker Love for their bright ideas, new features, improved looks, testing, patches and moral support! The original inspiration from the apmx tool by Jeff Chua . There is some code taken from his source - the "/proc/apm" access. The code for FreeBSD APM device access comes from apm tool by Tatsumi Hosokawa . The ideas for the digits on the screen come from asclock by Beat Christen and wmapm by Chris D. Faulhaber . Distribution: ============= The application and the source code are under GPL. See LICENSE file for details. Naturally, I would like to hear of all changes and improvements made to this utility. Enjoy and may the source be with you, Albert "Tigr"