Hunting the ‘net for anything to do with pekwm is a frustrating business. You can’t help thinking that there are only a handful of us that use it. I may post something about why I think pekwm is great, but that is a topic for another day.

As my laptop’s primary desktop environment is KDE, I wanted to use the KDE power management with pekwm, rather than install the Gnome Power Manager, which would bring in a load of Gnome dependencies. If you already have Gnome installed, then I suspect the Gnome Power Manager is for you.

There seem to be three parts to this:

1. Getting the power management daemon to run
2. Adding a power meter
3. Adding the configuration tool to the menu

Whilst these instructions are primarily for pekwm, I am sure that openbox, fluxbox and other *box window managers could use them with a little adjustment.

Power Management Daemon

In the ~/.pekwm/start file, add the lines:

kded4 & qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule powerdevil &

If you do not want to restart pekwm to test, just run those two commands live.

Battery Meter

Update: Since writing this post I have discovered tint2 which includes a simple battery monitor.

What I really want is a battery level meter that will sit happily in Docker, but I failed in this quest. If you have any suggestions, please do let me know and I will update this post. In the meantime I have installed xbattbar, which gives a full thin width line at the bottom of your screen.

$ sudo apt-get install xbattbar

In the ~/.pekwm/start file, add the line:

xbattbar &

Power Management Configuration

It is quite possible that you will wish to configure your power management from within pekwm. To do this, add the following to your ~/.pekwm/menu file:

Entry = "Configure Powerdevil" { Actions = "Exec kcmshell4 powerdevilconfig & " }

And that appears to be a working solution for me, I hope it works for you too!