maverick: gnome-power-manager does not display battery percentage on left icon click, even when told so by gconf-editor - instead wants to calculate time even if not possible

[Hans-Juergen Mauser]

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

Since upgrading from lucid to 10.10 maverick, gnome-power-manager (icon) does not display remaining battery percentage on my laptops as I was used to and which is the only possibility as the hardware is already a bit of age and does not support this time estimation (HP Omnibook XE3-GC, built around 2001). Instead, it wants to display the estimated remaining time which cannot be calculated, therefore on a left click it says in German "wird ermittelt...", which could be something like "being estimated" or "being calculated" in English.

gconf-editor provides a setting for disabling the time-based display of information, but it does not seem to work - percentage does not become available on tool tip / left click.

All information about the battery is present when opening the detailed dialog, so it seems to be just a problem about selecting the value for display.

Please make the percentage available again, at least according to the gconf-editor option or based on a mechanism that disables time estimation as soon as it detects to be impossible.

[Toni Rida (brit50483)]

I have the same problem using a HP Pavilion tx2000 laptop. I can confirm that the applet works correctly under Lucid, but will only display "Laptop battery (estimating ...) under Maverick.

[Kevin Wang (piatigorsky)]

Not much to add, except I'm experiencing the same situation with Maverick on MSI Wind U100 running desktop edition

[Toni Rida (brit50483)]

I found a a solution to this on another bug thread:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manager/+bug/629258/comments/78
https://launchpad.net/~brian-rogers/+archive/power

It still only shows percentage power remaining and not time remaining, but this is good enough for me. Hope this is helpful to someone.

[Hans-Juergen Mauser (hjmauser)]

Hello Toni,

thanks for your comment - this works perfectly for me, the display shows a usdeful percentage value again!

[Hans-Juergen Mauser (hjmauser)]

After several charges and discharges and also switching my system to the mainline kernel 2.6.36 (while still using the PPA version of the _tools_, never used that older kernel there), I even experience a great dynamic behaviour - it seems to be able to calculate a useful remaining time under certain circumstances and displays it in this case. If it cannot be calculated, the percentage is displayed instead. That's exactly what I expect as the best solution - but still it is not in the base maverick system.

[Benedikt Pirker (boynebe)]

i have the same problem on a hp pavillion dv7 2070 eg.
The battery status can be displayed with (for instance) docky.

it worked in lucid....

[DΛRK ΘVΞRLΘΛD (dark-overload)]

I have this same problem on my HP G62 laptop.