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Once upon a time, when I went to the battery icon on my netbook, I could get it to show me interesting graphs of the battery state, and how it had changed over time.

Nowadays, in this time of decay, all it will give me is a tooltip telling me how long I've got left, or how long to recharge.

Does anyone else remember the golden age of which I speak, or have any advice on how it might be regained?

John Lawrence Aspden
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  • battery-graph is nice, but it used to have better graphs of things like time-to-charge, time-to-discharge built in, and I wondered if anyone knew what had become of them. Could it be a package in the netbook-remix or something? – John Lawrence Aspden Mar 22 '11 at 22:14
  • Nope. It's not in NBR. Just checked in my NBR install. – jrg Mar 23 '11 at 10:46

3 Answers3

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Unity Users:

When you click on the indicator, and you see the time left on your battery, click that menu item. It should open a window that allows you to see this info:

enter image description here

KDE Users:

You can find this info under "Energy Information" in Kinfocenter. Note that you won't find any graphs on a system that is plugged in.

enter image description here

Community
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RolandiXor
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9

GNOME Users:

Simply run gnome-power-statistics in a terminal

or open the Power Statistics app from the GNOME Shell

Since you asked for this:

I could get it to show me interesting graphs of the battery state, and how it had changed over time.

  1. Go to the Laptop battery option
  2. Select the History tab
  3. Uncheck Show data points at the bottom if you want

And you will get a graph like this:

Power Statistics App showing battery history

Kewal Shah
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6

While I haven't seen the behavior that you're talking about (I've been using Ubuntu since 10.04, so it hasn't been that long), I do know that you can install a battery graphing package. Instructions below:

  1. Install battery-stats from the software center .

  2. Run battery-graph by hitting Alt-F2 and typing battery-graph

There you go! Example screenshot shown below: I've been plugged in, so my battery's been the same

Lincity
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jrg
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  • Thanks, that's handy, but it used to have much better graphing and stats collecting built in, and I was wondering whether the original system was packaged anywhere, or if anyone even knew what the components were called so I could install them myself. – John Lawrence Aspden Mar 22 '11 at 22:12
  • Nope. I don't have the answer for any of those. Sorry. :( – jrg Mar 22 '11 at 22:23
  • Well thanks anyway! battery-graph looks useful. – John Lawrence Aspden Mar 22 '11 at 22:24
  • You're welcome! If I find out anything else, I'll update this answer/add a new one - I'm interested in this as well. – jrg Mar 22 '11 at 22:47