1st off ... this is not meant as a criticism of Trollinger and/or it's grillmeister. Have a.) Always respected Machine's obvious nix skillz ... b.) Realize dealing with maintaining and putting together a distro must = a time consuming nightmare into which I wouldn't dare venture myself + c.) Think Trollinger is a dang fine gnu/nix OS, didn't think anyone could make me believe lxde wasn't a pos, Machine has done so w Trollinger.
Ok ... now with that out of the way, On topic.
Everybody knows lxde's native battery monitor is crap. While it works, though is reported to be buggy ... Either way it's an eye sore and butt ugly. Which of course is something pretty much every distro using lxde acknowledges. Thus began my journey to replace it with something else.
Bit of googling turned up a couple of possibilities. Gnome-power-manager and xfce4-power-manager.
Ended up going with xfce4-power-manager. Installed both xfce4-power-manager and another package called xfce4-power-manager-plugins ... Launched it with gmrun with the following "xfce4-power-manager" and the icon appeared in lxpanel as expected. Ok, so far, so good. Now I wanted it to autostart everytime I booted Trollinger. Opened file manager, hit Control + h to show hidden files and went into the .config/autostart folder. There are a couple files already here in Trollinger, used the one for Redshift as my example. Created a new file called Powermanager.desktop, copy + pasted the contents of the Redshit file into it and this is what the contents of that .desktop file ended up being.
Popped open a terminal and chmoded the file to make it executable. Not sure if this is/was necessary ... did it anyway with the following term command. "chmod u+x ~/.config/autostart/Powermanager". Rebooted ... bada bing, bada boom ... There the applet is in lxpanel @ startup. Findings ... liking it much better than the lxde battery monitor. Isn't butt ugly, seems to work well enough and is more like what a laptop user would want for a battery monitor imo. Goes w/o saying of course, that's strictly jmo + preferences.[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Powermanager
Comment=xfce4 power manager
Exec=xfce4-power-manager
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Notes on gnome-power-manager:
1st tried gnome-power-manager, as it didn't seem too heavy on depends. Installed it + reboot anddddd, it wiped out lxpanel. Left me with a nice grayed out area, where lxpanel was supposed to be. Fortunately ... lxde-rc.xml shortcuts were still working ( or could've used another tty/etc.) Being an admittedly lazy person. I just purged gnome-power-manager and then did "sudo apt-get autoremove && sudo apt-get autoclean" to flush out the other packages it had installed. Reboot again ... ok, lxpanel started working again.
That's pretty much it folks, hope you enjoyed another dorking around w nix chronicle. Tune in next time for more thrilling and painful stuff I do to myself via excessive dorking and pebcak ( aka: Problem exists between chair and keyboard. :P) nix misadventures
PS, Edit ... secondary findings:
This laptop is a power sucking pig dog from hell apparently ! Sighs ... jebuz, the idea of having to learn about optimizing for laptop power savings + utils + settings, cpu freq etc. Is making me wanna projectile puke ... Arghhhhh ! At this rate ... I might actually get something productive done by the year 2056 !!! More arghhhhh's !!! :P