# Tips for a laptop user?

## meekrob

Are there any packages I should install as a laptop user?  Last night I ran out of batteries with no warning, what can I do to prevent that?  I'm a gnome user by the way.  If anyone has some good laptop hints I'd love to hear em.

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## technomage

Make sure you have apm enabled in your kernel configuration and  then you can use the GNOME battery applet to check on your battery status. There are also some hints on the linux laptop howto about using hdparm to set your disk parameters accordingly.  using the apm commands you can sleep your laptop and shut it down using power management.

hope this helps

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## femistofel

since i hardly ever run X and absolutelly never GNOME i use other method of checking batteries status: 

```
cat /proc/apm
```

this command shows some criptic line where one of the last numbers is something like 50% that is how full are the batteries. of course there must be some programs that check this value, or you can write your own, but for me cat is enough.

cheers[/i]

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## clattuc

Or, if you prefer not to parse the cryptic line from /proc/apm yourself, you can run the command 'apm', and it will do the hard work for you...  :Wink: 

If you run apmd it should warn you if you're battery's getting low.

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## phliver

just run the command "apm" and it will read the file for you and display a nicely formated value on the console.

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