# battery monitor (amd64)

## otake-tux

Hello.  I just finished installing gentoo on my laptop 6 hours ago.  I have an Acer 5004wlmi turion laptop running kernel 2.6.15.

I read that the best 64 bit linux distribution was gentoo so here I am.  Now since this is a laptop I'm running I need to know how much battery life I have left at any given time.  I would like to know how to get gnome to display my battery.  I right click on the panel and can find no application that does this.  I searched portage and I found wmbattery which does not do anything when I plug or unplug the ac adapter.

Any help would be much apreciated...

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## joker

first check if your system sees the battery and ac-adapter:

```
acpi -V
```

then emerge one of the battery monitor, for gnome it's gnome/extra-battstat

```
emerge battstat
```

good luck  :Smile: 

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## otake-tux

```
acpi -V
```

returns 

```
bash: acpi: command not found
```

and battstat is a masked package....

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## joker

```
emerge acpi
```

there are lot of battery monitors in portage, you need to look something for you. on my amd64 I used battery monitor from kde, gkrellm2 and from conky (which using acpi command to display information)

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## otake-tux

That's also a masked package.  Don't you mean acpid?  under acpi it says:

```
 Attempts to replicate the functionality of the 'old' apm command on ACPI systems, including battery and thermal information.

```

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## joker

acpi command comes from apci package.

this package is ~amd64, so you may want to add it to package.keyword with ~amd64

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## lyonsd

 *joker wrote:*   

> 
> 
> ```
> emerge acpi
> ```
> ...

 

What is the name of the KDE one?  That is, how do you launch it from the command line?

Thanks.

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## tboloo

 *lyonsd wrote:*   

> 
> 
> What is the name of the KDE one?  That is, how do you launch it from the command line?
> 
> Thanks.

 

The one I use is called KThinkBat (ebuild on bugs.gentoo.org), but I don't think that it can be launched from command line. Instead you may try to cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT*/state

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## joker

 *lyonsd wrote:*   

> 
> 
> What is the name of the KDE one?  That is, how do you launch it from the command line?
> 
> Thanks.

 

```
emerge klaptopdaemon
```

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