How to make batterycharge indicator work?

[phantom blot]

I have lubuntu 12..04 on an old iBook G4 and I have installed a new after marked replacement battery. It wor ks fine, and now that I have a working battery it would be nice to be able to monitor charge levels, at least to have an idea how much battery is left. I have been googelig "far and wide" to find any info on this, posted on the Ubuntu forum but very few seem to use the lxde desktop environment. Some laptop users seem to have this working by default, by just placing the cursor on the lightning icon it shows charge levels. Is there a way to activate some how when it is not working by default? It might be some kind of powerpc issue, but I haven`t found any info on it.

[seppalta]

Doesn't your battery applet in the panel work? Right click on the panel>Add-Remove>Panel Applets>Battery Monitor.

[phantom blot]

I was given some help at work a few days ago. I know have a somewhat working battery indicator. It is the lightning icon, and it shows a message with charge % when I place cursor on it. Still there are problems; it only shows actual charge levels after a full reboot, other wise it is stuck on what ever it was when I unplugged from the charger. It does read charge levels charging up, but decharging it will be stuck on 99% until computer goes dormant due to flat battery. During reboot indicator somehow show correct levels, but no repons during decharging.

System
Ibook G4 2005, 1.4GHz CPU, 1GB RAM
Lubuntu 12.04
New after marked replacement battery

[phantom blot]

Thanks for the suggestion seppalta, it worked !! I had yet a go at it and finally understood the right click on the task bar (double fingers). I was given a sudo command that made the icon appear on the taskbar, but as mentioned it didn`t activate it entirely. It shall be good to get to know the lxde functions better

[phantom blot]

I am still on this case with some odd issues. The battery indicator shows charge fine, but it show "adaptor is online" regardless if charger is plugin or not. I have been through all settings and I can`t find any that deals with this part. Any idea on how to trouble shoot?

[phantom blot]

Battery indicator has gone back to frozen. Right now it shows "Your battery is full charged (0%)", and the adaptor has been in for hours. Is this treated as a lxde issue, or is it related to other parts of the system? Luckily battery works fine, it is only the indicator never showing right charge levels, unless the laptop is just booted. I`m not the only one with this problem either.

[seppalta]

I am not bad mouthing LXDE. It is the only desktop that I use. However, its weak component is lxpanel. Not only does the battery indicator occasionally freeze, but this can happen to the panel itself. It is easy to restart (lxpanelctl restart), but this should not be requirement of its usage. So I just replace it, generally with Tint2, a very stable, lightweight (1011kb), extremely configurable panel. It does not offer a whole lot of applets - battery, time and a few others - but any application or control with a .desktop file can be put on it. I keep lxpanel installed, just don't display it, so that I can put the LXDE menu on the Tint2 panel. For a guide to installing and using Tint2, see http://lxlinux.com/tint2.html.

[phantom blot]

Thanks for the info. I have had little to no problem with the desktop and panel, at the moment it is only the battery icon not working. Everything have been stable and depedable. Luckily I have the indicator light on the actual battery. I tried "lxpanelctl restart" in terminal, but battery shows the same out of sync message. It probably needs attention from developers. I`m sticking with the lxsd desktop anyhow, hoping I can find a fix.