asapm is Advanced Power Management monitor utility for X Windows
Copyright (c) 1998-2000  Albert "Tigr" Dorofeev <albert@tigr.net>
For the updates check http://www.tigr.net/

Description:
============

This is an AfterStep look & feel Advanced Power Management (APM) 
monitor for laptops and notebook PCs running Linux or 
FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD and X Windows.

I have a laptop myself and I ran xapm when I used fvwm window
manager. Then I switched over to AfterStep which looks really
beautiful. (see http://www.afterstep.org/). I wanted some
nice applet to put it in my Wharf. Well, to make the story
short, I did not find any that I liked. The best bet was then
to write my own. So, I just grabbed a X book and tried.

The interface evolved with the time and I am finally beginning
to like the way it looks. I may stop writing new versions for
a while now. Let me know if there are any neat options you'd
like to see though.

Basically, the tool shows you the following:
- The bar-like indicator of the charge left in the battery
  which appears on the left side and is battery-shaped.
  The bottom part shows the charge left in the battery.
  The colors may be customized.
- The top line works as a pair of indicators. You see there
  a battery outline which is "green" when the battery status
  is high, "yellow" when the battery status is low, and
  "red" when the battery status is critical. The colors may
  be customized. The definition of the high, low, critical
  status may be mine :-) or APM daemon's - you can choose.
  The AC plug outline is black while you run the computer
  on the battery and it turns "green" when your computer
  is connected to the mains.
- The second line is the charge left in the battery in percent.
  If the APM daemon does not return a good value for it, the
  display is disabled.
- The third line is the estimate of the time left before the
  complete discharge of the battery. This estimate is either
  provided by the APM daemon or is calculated by this tool
  itself. When there is no estimate available the display is
  disabled.

The tool parses the resource files if such are available and you
can specify certain commands to be executed in reaction to certain
APM events. For example, you may use hdparm (8) to change the 
timeouts for the hard disk spin-down when you switch to/from the
AC power. Just be careful with that tool, okay? You can also
ask asapm to suspend the computer when the power reaches down to,
say, 10% (use apm (1)) in case you forget to shut down your computer 
and go to sleep (talking from my own experience here :-).
The default location for the resource file ~/.asapmrc (what
a surprise!) and can be changed with -rc option.

Actually, there are more customization options then I personally want. 
There are tons of them. Check the man page for the details 
(nroff -man asapm.man | more) or run asapm -h for a brief description.
The syntax of the asapm resource file is described in there too.

The program may be used directly or in the Afterstep "wharf". It also 
supports the WindowMaker docker (-withdrawn option). It may be used 
in all other window managers as well. I tried it with fvwm2 and it looks
quite nice sitting in a corner as an icon.

You may want to have a look in the CHANGES file for the history of updates.

Credits:
========

Great many thanks to 
	Jim Knoble <jmknoble@pobox.com>
	Brett Taylor <brett@peloton.physics.montana.edu>
	Brian Handy <handy@physics.montana.edu> 
	John Schweitzer <thanatos@chaeron.dyn.ml.org>
	Dagmar d'Surreal <dagmar@estates.ml.org>
	Johnny C. Lam <lamj@stat.cmu.edu>
	Brian Joseph Czapiga (Joe) <rys@tir.com>
	Avatar Tai-hwa Liang <avatar@www.mmlab.cse.yzu.edu.tw>
	Robert Clare <clare@mail.cern.ch>
	Stephen Crane <jsc@darkstar.szyzygy.org>
	Bernd Sieker <bsieker@freenet.de>
for their bright ideas, new features, improved looks, testing, 
patches and moral support!

The original inspiration from the apmx tool by Jeff Chua <jchua@fedex.com>. 
There is some code taken from his source - the "/proc/apm" access.
The code for FreeBSD APM device access comes from apm tool by 
Tatsumi Hosokawa <hosokawa@jp.FreeBSD.org>.
The ideas for the digits on the screen come from asclock by 
Beat Christen <bchriste@iiic.ethz.ch> and wmapm by 
Chris D. Faulhaber <jedgar@speck.ml.org>.

Distribution:
=============

The application and the source code are under GPL. See LICENSE 
file for details.

Naturally, I would like to hear of all changes and improvements 
made to this utility.

Enjoy and may the source be with you,
Albert "Tigr"

