The Gnome power manager applet on my new Gateway MX-6958 seems to mostly work well: If you mouseover the battery icon it gives a "tooltip" with the battery status. It gives popup notifications when you plugin or remove the AC adapter. If you right-click on the battery, you can set all kinds of action options and see nifty graphs.

But it doesn't give a "low battery" popup warning. If you don't happen to notice the battery condition, the first clue you get is when the laptop shuts off. The digging I've done suggests there should be a popup, but the Gnome configuration-editor doesn't show any possibility to change this, and the documentation I've looked at on man pages and on the power-manager website doesn't mention this at all. Does anyone know details on this, or where such message options are set, or how this might be troubleshot?

Thanks for any help!

I just verified that if you right-click on the battery, you can bring up a configuration dialog where you can, among other options, select whether and when you want to recieve a low energy warning.

Hope this was what you were looking for.

OK, here's the problem: when I right click on the battery, a config dialog does come up, but DOES NOT contain any options for setting a low energy warning. The dialog box has a tabbed interface for actions to be taken with or without AC power and lets you set what you want to happen when various conditions exist (e.g. hibernate, suspend or shutdown), but there are no notification options there that I can find... So why not? and is there some config I can change that would enable this??

I already tried the Gnome configuration-editor, and there's nothing under that applet that shows for warnings or notifications. And since it DOES notify when the AC adapter is inserted or removed, the capability is there...

I think I've tracked down the problem - we were talking about two different applets. From your description I gather you meant the icon that pops up automatically in the notification area. What I had in mind, and what I'd recommend you to try out, is the battery monitor you can start by right-clicking on the panel and choosing "add to panel".

Aha!!! You are sooo right! I added that monitor to the panel and checked out the config when you right click it. Sure enough, it has the option to set when to get the low power warning. So now I'll see if that works. Many thanks for your help!!