Battery Monitor, or how to receive notifications about battery events in Ubuntu

Many times, when my Ubuntu PC's battery is running out, I find out because I myself look at the right side of the top bar and see that it is red. Ubuntu only shows a notification when its battery is very low and sometimes I wish it would notify me sooner or of some other battery related problem. Battery Monitor is a small application developed in Python that will notify us of practically any event related to the battery of our Ubuntu PC.

Battery Monitor does not add any icon in the top bar, since the one that Ubuntu already includes would be redundant. Instead, the only thing you will do is show battery event notifications, Ubuntu native notifications, such as Downloading / Loading when we disconnect / connect the mains cable or a warning when the battery has been charged to 100%. In addition, the visual notification will also be accompanied by a sound, but only in some of these notices.

How to install Battery Monitor on Ubuntu (14.04+)

Downloading and installing Battery Monitor is very simple. All we have to do is the following:

1. We download the .deb package from the following link:

2. If it does not open automatically at the end of the download, we double click on the downloaded file. Personally, since I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04.1 the Ubuntu Software Center has not worked very well for me, so I have installed the GDebi package installer.
3. We install the dependencies with the following command:

   sudo apt install python3 python3-gi libnotify-dev acpi

4. Although it is automatically added to the startup applications, after installing Battery Monitor we will have to run it manually (or exit and enter a new session).

And that would be all. Now we can only wait for something related to the battery to happen, something that will no longer take us by surprise.

Source | omnibuntu