two problems recently appeared.

1. the plasma battery monitor does not seem to be working properly. when i plug in the power adapter to charge the laptop, e.g., the battery charge information does not get updated. the icon continues to show whatever information it was showing before. unplugging and replugging the adapter forces the icon to update.

2. changes to plasma cause the digital clock font to change in size. plugging in the power adapter, e.g., enlarges the font size.

has anyone else encountered these issues?

For issue 1, please ensure that UPower or HAL is providing the correct information to KDE. Both are accessible over D-Bus on the system bus, so you should be able to use qdbusviewer to browse them and find the relevant information. I don't experience this behaviour myself.

Issue 2 is likely part expected behaviour and partly due to the layout of your panel. In my experience however, the panel size doesn't change when connecting or disconnecting my laptop charger.

bcooksley wrote:For issue 1, please ensure that UPower or HAL is providing the correct information to KDE. Both are accessible over D-Bus on the system bus, so you should be able to use qdbusviewer to browse them and find the relevant information. I don't experience this behaviour myself.

as far as i can tell, upower is working fine. qdbusviewer shows the correct information (looking at the percentage). also, when i unplug/replug the power adapter, the battery icon is refreshed and shows the correct number. it seems like a plasma issue.

Issue 2 is likely part expected behaviour and partly due to the layout of your panel. In my experience however, the panel size doesn't change when connecting or disconnecting my laptop charger.

why might the layout matter? my small panel includes just the system tray and the digital clock. i leave the panel alone, so it's hard to see why the font size should change.

The font size changes because the width of the battery applet likely slightly increases or decreases as the charging icon appears and disappears. As a result, the width of the clock is changed, resulting in the font size changing.

I don't experience this because I have the task manager in my panel, which has a large amount of space available it can freely give up.

With regards to the UPower issue, I would ensure that KDE is actually using it, which should be the default case with KDE 4.6 and later, unless your distribution has altered the compilation flags.

thanks. changing the panel layout fixed the second issue.

i'm pretty sure upower is being used. everything was working fine before. i think a recent update may have caused the problem, but i can't remember when it started.

Ok, you probably want to file a bug against Plasma, as it seems that it isn't updating as UPower is changing. The bug might be on the UPower side however, as Plasma would depend upon UPower informing it that changes had occurred.

interesting. my other laptop just developed the problem today. i last updated the laptop two days ago, so as far as i can tell, updates aren't the culprit.

i'll file a bug.

edit: here's the bug report.

here's the bug report.