Rob, the choice of selecting the mouse battery over the laptop battery in the use case in omeil's comment #3 is by design, since the specification is to choose the battery that will be empty soonest.
However, I believe that's a separate issue from the two-laptop-batteries case reported by Mathieu here and by you in bug #1290623. It makes sense to combine two laptop batteries into a totaled representation; it doesn't make sense to do that for a laptop battery + mouse battery. :) So, I sat down to code on this yesterday and realized there are still cases where I'm not sure what the Right Thing is. The spec's revised form says to total together multiple batteries iff "a device has multiple batteries and uses only one of them at a time" but judging from Rob's upower dump yesterday <https://launchpadlibrarian.net/169021213/UPowerDump.txt> another valid use case is two laptop batteries that are both discharging. My thoughts on it: * If the laptop has two or more DISCHARGING batteries (Rob's case), we could use an average of their percentages and the maximum of their time- remaining values. * Otherwise, if the laptop has one DISCHARGING and one or more IDLE batteries (Mathieu's case), we could use an average of their percentages and the sum of time-remaining. * Otherwise, if the laptop has one CHARGING and one or more IDLE batteries, we could use an average of their percentages and the maximum of the CHARGING time-remaining values. * Otherwise, if the laptop has both CHARGING and DISCHARGING batteries at the same time... first off, I'm not sure this is a meaningful use case? What icon would we use? :) We could use an average of the batteries' percentages and either not report a time, or use the maximum of the DISCHARGING time-remaining values. * Otherwise, do not average batteries together in the header. Punting back to mpt for a second opinion on this. ;) ** Changed in: indicator-power Status: Triaged => Confirmed ** Changed in: indicator-power Assignee: Charles Kerr (charlesk) => Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of DX Packages, which is subscribed to indicator-power in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/880881 Title: Power indicator does not combine multiple battery status Status in The Power Indicator: Confirmed Status in “indicator-power” package in Ubuntu: Triaged Bug description: I have an EliteBook 8540w with internal and external battery running Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric). Linux #### 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 7 14:56:25 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux The power indicator (indicator-power, version 0.9-0ubuntu2) does not combine the status of both batteries. E.g. if one battery still has 1 hour left, and the other has 2 hours left, it will show 1:00 or 2:00, instead of 3:00. E.g. When the external battery is almost run out (but the internal one is still charged), the indicator becomes red, instead of staying white/grey. It should only be red when both batteries are almost drained. E.g. when the internal one is fully charged, and the external one is discharging, the estimated time show is the estimated time that the external one will be discharged, not taking into account the internal one. see attached screenshot (total time show should be around 4 hours) The original applet provided by gnome (I re-enabled the notification area) does (still) have the behavior as I expect. In other words, this is a regression compared to 10.10 (pre-unity). To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/indicator-power/+bug/880881/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~dx-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~dx-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp

