Knowledge Base

Powerkit is a neat FLOSS package for monitoring your battery status, and configuring actions associated with batteries and laptop lids. And now it is available for Devuan ceres in my third-party repository! That first link is the build artifacts. Select this link for the nice download page.

Overview

Powerkit is a desktop-independent power manager. You can change settings for how long to wait before locking or suspending or hibernating, and control screen brightness.

Screenshots

I learned with this utility that my one laptop battery is actually treated as two separate batteries! My model uses a 3 cell+3 cell arrangement. I was shocked when I learned that my one invocation of cbatticon was dutifully monitoring just the first-reported battery, the one that drains first when off mains power. But there's a second battery, as seen by GNU/Linux!

Story

I have been using cbatticon in my minimal Fluxbox window manager for a while now. I came across this nifty Powerkit utility and skipped it over at first because it requires QT 4.8+. With the recent removal of QT4 packages from Debian (the upstream for Devuan), and my ongoing efforts to maintain some binary packages from Debian's past for QT4, just so I can install Puddletag, I did not feel like trying to actually build something that depends on QT4. I found, however, that the Arch community builds powerkit with QT5. Armed with this information, I began my effort to build Powerkit for Devuan. While some of the Devuan target audience may not care about upower or dbus, I am willing to make a few compromises.