[EN] SOLVED. LXQT Battery Indicator does not appear on panel ??

[dibl]

I am normally a KDE/Plasma desktop user, so ......

An old laptop in good condition fell into my hands, but only 1G of memory, dead battery, and ancient hdd. I spent $100 USD and got a new battery, an 8G DIMM, and a 125G SSD and now it works pretty well for a little over 2 hours, until the battery is discharged. I installed LxQt "Giants" on it. Here is the system:

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System:
  Kernel: 6.6.4-1-siduction-amd64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: LXQt v: 1.3.0
    Distro: siduction 2023.1.1 giants - lxqt - (202309091910)
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: Hewlett-Packard product: Presario CQ56 Notebook PC
    v: 058D100002242810010620100 serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: Hewlett-Packard model: 1604 v: 88.17 serial: <superuser required>
    BIOS: Hewlett-Packard v: F.18 date: 04/18/2011
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 37.3 Wh (76.6%) condition: 48.7/48.7 Wh (100.0%)
    volts: 11.5 min: 11.1
CPU:
  Info: single core model: AMD V140 bits: 64 type: UP cache: L2: 512 KiB
  Speed (MHz): 800 min/max: 800/2300 core: 1: 800
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD RS880M [Mobility Radeon HD 4225/4250] driver: radeon v: kernel               
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.9 driver: X: loaded: radeon                             
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa dri: r600 gpu: radeon                                   
    resolution: 1366x768~60Hz                                                                 
  API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: kms_swrast,r600,swrast                                             
    platforms: gbm,x11,surfaceless,device                                                     
  API: OpenGL v: 3.3 compat-v: 3.0 vendor: mesa v: 23.2.1-1 renderer: AMD                     
    RS880 (DRM 2.50.0 / 6.6.4-1-siduction-amd64 LLVM 16.0.6)                                 
Audio:                                                                                       
  Device-1: AMD SBx00 Azalia driver: snd_hda_intel                                           
  API: ALSA v: k6.6.4-1-siduction-amd64 status: kernel-api                                   
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.0.0 status: active                                                 
Network:                                                                                     
  Device-1: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter driver: ath9k                   
  IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter>                                                           
  Device-2: Realtek RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet driver: r8169                         
  IF: enp3s0 state: down mac: <filter>                                                       
Drives:                                                                                       
  Local Storage: total: 111.79 GiB used: 8.22 GiB (7.4%)                                     
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Kingston model: SQ500S37120G size: 111.79 GiB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 46.95 GiB used: 6.54 GiB (13.9%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda4
  ID-2: /boot size: 1007.9 MiB used: 180.4 MiB (17.9%) fs: ext2
    dev: /dev/sda3
  ID-3: /boot/efi size: 511 MiB used: 4 KiB (0.0%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/sda1
  ID-4: /home size: 53.12 GiB used: 1.51 GiB (2.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda5
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 8 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/sda2
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 59.4 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (rpm): N/A
Info:
  Processes: 141 Uptime: 0m Memory: total: 8 GiB note: est.
  available: 7.52 GiB used: 711.5 MiB (9.2%) Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.31

I have played with the LxQt configuration settings, including power management. There are 3 lovely battery display options, and I have checked the boxes to enable the battery monitor and to have the icon displayed. I have tried all the icons. Nothing appears on the panel. I played with panel configurations but no help there. I suspect a bug, but maybe I am the bug ....

Does anyone know anything about this issue?

(I should have gotten Alf Gaida's phone number!)

[eriefisher]

It's been a while since I was using LXQT but as I remember it's similar to Xfce4. First you have the status notifier on the panel then the power manager sits in the tray. Like I said this is all from memory.

I liked LXQT for the most part but found it really disconnected in some aspects. I reported some faulty behavior of the nm-applet on github as a bug and the response was a link to the source code. After finding a bunch of little things frustratingly buggy I left it behind. I think it could become a great alternative but it's not there yet.

[dibl]

I think it could become a great alternative but it's not there yet.

LOL!  Perhaps "light weight" is another way to say "incomplete"!

I've used it on ancient laptops for a long while. The last old Dell from about 2009 ran LxQt for many years with no problem, but it died before this last version came out. Basically I'm just using these for browser appliances in the bedroom. This new LxQt that came with Giants actually is pretty satisfactory in all other ways. I'm not a fan of the so-called "desktop" launchers -- I prefer a clean desktop screen and the frequently used packages parked on the task manager, and that works perfectly. Connman is fully functional, if kind of complicated. Partitioning the SSD was a bit tricky, but that's not on LxQt.

On the old Dell I had a Plank launcher at the top of the screen, but I don't think I need to bother with that since this setup is working perfectly from the task manager on the panel. I guess I'll just have to set a stopwatch to 2 hours, 10 minutes and then shut it down,

[mdmarmer]

LXQt does not have a battery monitor widget/icon.  If you have the Status Notifier and System Tray widgets on your LXQt panel and you have the LXQt PowerManagement settings checked, the battery status should be displayed when the battery level is at or lower than your percentage setting in PowerManagement.  I haven't tested this -- right now my laptop is showing only bluetooth status and removable media so there may be another step that I'm missing. (I'm running on AC power so that the battery is almost fully charged).

[dibl]

Thanks, @mdmarmer!

I haven't tested this --

I have tested it. The laptop just dies -- after 2+ hours, the screen goes black, white cursor blinks for some further time -- I haven't waited until the rest of the system shuts down. At that point, I can still use Alt-PrtSn-RSEIUB to shut it down the rest of the way.

I noticed there is a "showIcon=true" line in ~./config/lxqt/lxqt-powermanagement.conf, but that line is not in /etc/xdg/lxqt/lxqt-powermanagement.conf. I added it there, but it makes no difference.

[eriefisher]

Until the LXQT folks can put it all together you can just use notify-send to keep you updated on the charge status. This of course assumes your sitting in from of the laptop.

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while sleep 20; do $(notify-send "Battery Status $(acpi -b)") ; doneIf your walking away from it you would need to expand it to shutdown below a specified percentage. I'm not a great script writer and would need to research that one but it's doable.

[dibl]

Until the LXQT folks can put it all together you can just use notify-send to keep you updated on the charge status. This of course assumes your sitting in from of the laptop.

Code: [Select]

while sleep 20; do $(notify-send "Battery Status $(acpi -b)") ; doneIf your walking away from it you would need to expand it to shutdown below a specified percentage. I'm not a great script writer and would need to research that one but it's doable.

Hey, that's a good tip -- I didn't know about that.

Thanks, @eriefisher!

EDIT: I backed it off to 60-second intervals and it works GREAT!  Thanks again.

[eriefisher]

Yes, sorry, I should have mentioned to adjust the time to your preference. 20 was just a random choice. Likely impracticable but it got the point across. I'm glad it works for you.

[mdmarmer]

On reboot everything is working -- I have a battery minder with percentage on my panel and a notification box. I did check to make sure upower, libkf5solid5, libkf5solid5-data and libkf5solid-bin were installed. I also have plank and meteo-qt.  See the attached screenshot.

[dibl]

@mdmarmer, thank you very much for this!

Of the packages you listed, I did not have libkf5solid-bin, mateo-qt, and plank. I installed them one at a time, with their dependencies (of course) and rebooted, hoping to detect which one fixed the issue. Unhappily, the icon remains in hiding on my system, and I see it is working perfectly on yours. 

I did not actually run plank -- I don't need it, and I cannot believe that running it would change the behavior of LXQt power management.

EDIT (11 DEC): There has been a minor improvement, apparently resulting from one of the packages that I installed yesterday. Today I deliberately let the battery run down while using the laptop, and instead of simply blacking out the screen, I got a warning from lxqt-powermanagement that the system would be shut down in 29 seconds due to low battery.

[reddark]

tip ... screen   [ You are not allowed to view this attachment ]  

[dibl]

Vielen Dank!

Es wurde gefunden - das Problem ist gelöst. Wunderbar!   

[reddark]

fein 

[mdmarmer]

Before recent upgrades hexchat would show on my panel when it is running and the icon would blink whenever there was new conversation on irc.  The icon no longer appears.  I'll post this on LXDE forum as well (there's no LXQT forum) as it appears to be an LXQT bug. (EDIT) This happened because I added hexchat to LXQT autostart -- if I close it and open it again, the panel works as it did before. I'm marking this solved.