Kbatt (battery / acpi) question?
 

Hey all,

I am running MDK 10 and want to be able to see my battery indicator on the panel..I have been working and just suddenly lost power all of a sudden, SUCKED!

My question is I, I have successfully downloaded and untarred Kbatt-0.11 from sourceforge and am having problems installing it.

When I run ./configure it returns the following error.

checking for extra libs... no
checking for libz... configure: error: not found. Check your installation and look into config.log
[root@localhost kbatt-0.11]#


I have read other errors from the site regaurding Kbatt but all had to do with qt. I also tried the solutions stated in these posts to no avail.

Any suggestions..I know the status is geing read because when I type 'acpi' it returns the status of the battery. How can i make Kbatt read and display this for me.

P.S. I had it installed on a previous install of MDK 10 and it worked fine, and the error returned does not tell me much.

Thanks,

Digit

My suggestion, and I may be a bit biased:p, is to try another Linux flavor. While you shouldn't have to do that, I have had a bunch of problems out of all Mandy versions I've tried, including several with the compile tools (doesn't Mandy come with kbatt anyway? I remember seeing it).

What all is your existing copy of kbatt doing? Even if you don't have kbatt running, your laptop should signal low battery through its case lights and speaker before the battery goes anyway. If it has done nothing, attacking your APM may be a wiser idea.:scratch:

All of the documents I read about getting kbatt to work suggested that I install and enable acpi and acpid, which I did. I also enabled acpi in the boot loader. is apm a better service to try to use with kbatt..

digit

ACPI is "better" though buggy under Linux (as far as I know, I'm not the premiere expert). You can definately try both of them one at a time and see what happens.

Again, I have fixed a large number of problems by using RedHat instead of Mandrake. Nothing on Mandrake works for me.

Thanks, but I am a new-b in its plainest defitition and I tried red hat for a while and I couldnt work with it...I plan to install it on a desktop..but my laptop i need something flexable and user friendly..

I will eventually figure out the battery thing. I can al

As long as your acpi is working ok you could try
a krell monitor like gkrellm. It will show your battery
state and much more. There are alot of themes for
it so you can make it look cool and leave it run all
the time.

Again, I gotta push you toward RedHat. It's more user friendly to me, mostly because it works better. Nothing's worse to a newbie (like me) who keeps having all these wierd problems that nobody knows, and by switching flavors, they all just go away.

Not the Distro
 

It's not the distro. I use Debian but don't recommend it to newbies. Once you are well aquainted with your inner geek and tired of circular dependency errors, THEN switch to Debian. But for Mandrake, you should be able to just download and install the kbatt mdk package from Mandy's site. If not, try to find an MDK package on KDE's site or try an RPM from KDE. The rpm command works just as well and exacly the same on Mandrake as on RH. It's good that you are trying to compile from source though. You learn a lot that way, so keep at it.

checking for extra libs... no
checking for libz... configure: error: not found. Check your installation and look into config.log

it looks like you do not have libz (might not be a recent enough or too recent version. might be located in a different place than .config expects it to be). Get that package and install it first. (This is BTW step one of getting tired of circular dependency errors). Work the problem. take the advice given in the error output.

"less config.log"

Look towards the bottom of the file. You may find more verbose information there.

Re: Not the Distro
 

My experiences with RH and Mandy have told me otherwise. I guess it's a luck-of-the-draw type of thing.:D

Anyway, try to find it on FreshMeat or Icewalkers or something. It may just be part of KDE.
I'll ask again, does your laptop give you any warning whatsoever that the battery's about to go? Even if Linux ACPI isn't working, the laptop should start beeping that the battery's about gone.

My Kbatt has 4 states: Full, Partial (80%), Low, and Almost Gone. I would like to have more states, but the Windows battery meter has the same four states.

Thanks every one, I fixed it...I had to install the kdetools package...It was right in front of my eyes the entire time..Someone on IRC mentioned it to me the other day and WHAM! Battery meter ahoy.

Thanks again
digit

Dam those dependencies!:p They cause a lot of people a lot of heartace.:D

I have same problemn with battery on KDE. I solved it by switching to Gnome which works fime. Please let me know if you sort the KDE battery broblem


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