The battery indicator in Unity panel not showing up

Question

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 with Wubi. Well after being completely dazzled with the amount of free content in the Software Centre, I decided to go deeper and start messing with settings. Well after changing the screen brightness the highest level I noticed that there wasn't an indicator for how much battery was left in my laptop. I looked up online on got 2 suggestions on how to fix:

• Right click on the Unity panel and add an indicator
• Set it to show in the power settings menu.

Well I did both when I right click at the top menu nothing comes up and setting it to show does nothing either. Then I tried installing something in the Software Centre. I got something but when I activated it it said I had 0% power left even though I was charging and at %100 according the Light in the front of my laptop. So now I'm thinking that it doesn't even recognise my computer as a laptop which is weird because in the display settings it says my screen size is set to laptop.

How can I install it?

I don't know what version it is other then Ubuntu 12.04 and no matter what the icon does not appear with the

Solution 1

I'm not sure if Beeju meant Power or Power Manager. In any case, I was able to solve this problem by:

Click on the power button in the top right hand corner select: System Settings... > Power > Show battery status in the menu bar > Change to When battery is charging/in use

Restart, go back to System Settings... > Power a bunch more options are now avaialble.

Solution 2

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

Solution 3

Run the Power Manager and see this checked: Show notifications to notify about the battery state. This should solve your issue.

Solution 4

Battery indicator should run with the Unity Panel, but sometimes is inhibited for strange reasons.

You can try to force the daemon to run, writing gnome-settings-daemon in the terminal.

If it works, and you see the battery indicator in the panel, you can add the command to the Startup Applications.

How do I start applications automatically on login?

It work great for me, I hope it can help you!

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Comments

[jobrfr]

which Ubuntu version are you using? and what happens when you unplug your laptop - is the battery indicator visible then?

[jobrfr]

If you want to change completely to Ubuntu and the missing battery indicator is what's holding you back, you can boot a Ubuntu session from live CD: there will be no changes to your Windows installation but you should be able to see the battery indicator then. I think it's a problem with Wubi, not with Ubuntu.

[mahesh]

Same problem here. Acer One 532.

[mahesh]

Where is the power manager?

[Zanna]

since OP "set it to show in the power settings menu" already, this doesn't seem like it would help?