Ubuntu – How to get a warning before the laptop powers off

batterypower-managementshutdown

In previous versions of Ubuntu, when my laptop battery hit somewhere around 20% power, the icon in the Gnome panel (I use Flashback) would turn red. Also, there would be intermittent warnings telling me the computer was going to power off soon.

However, since upgrading to 14.04, I no longer get warnings, and, as far as I can tell, the computer is powering off a little early, like around 30%. I'Ve been caught off guard multiple times now.

In the power settings dialog, there is an option for what to do when power is critically low, and I can change it to "Hibernate" or "Power off". But there seems to be nothing about warnings or what determines "critically low".

How do I get Ubuntu to give me fair warning before powering off? And can I get it to have a little more patience instead of panicking and shutting down when I've still got an hour left?

Best Answer

You can set the levels for "low", "critically low" and "action" by entering the following commands at the terminal:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power percentage-low XX
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power percentage-critical YY
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power percentage-action ZZ
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power use-time-for-policy false

where XX, YY and ZZ are the battery charge levels. Set use-time-for-policy to "false" to define the "level" in terms of battery charge level (instead of time to empty).

To see existing levels, use

gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power percentage-low
gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power percentage-critical
gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power percentage-action
gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power use-time-for-policy