Monitoring Notebook Battery with IBAM

Productivity Sauce

While KDE, Gnome, and Xfce come with dedicated graphical utilities for monitoring notebook battery, you might still want to use IBAM to keep an eye on the battery parameters directly from the command line. IBAM stands for Intelligent Battery Monitor, and it "uses statistical and adaptive linear methods to provide accurate estimations of minutes of battery left or of the time needed until full recharge." In layman terms, this means that IBAM provides a more accurate estimate of the remaining battery life and charge time. IBAM does this by creating a battery and charge profile from which it can compute the actual times.

To find out the remaining battery life (or charging time, if the notebook is plugged into the mains), simply run the ibam command. As any command-line tool, IBAM supports a number of useful command line parameters, and you can get a quick overview of the available options by running the ibam --help command. My personal favorite is the -a (or --all) option which displays detailed information about the battery. --plot is another nifty option which generates a chart of battery life and charge time. On Ubuntu, IBAM is available in the Universe software repository, so installing the utility is as easy as running the sudo apt-get install ibam command. If using IBAM from the command line is not your cup of tea, you will be pleased to learn that the utility is also available as a plugin for the KGrellM graphical system monitor. To install the plugin on Ubuntu, use the sudo apt-get install gkrellm-ibam command. You can then enable the installed module in the Plugins section of the GKrellM Configuration window.

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