When the battery level reaches 10% on my Dell Inspirion Laptop, it emits a very faint beep. This is not enough to remind me to plugin. When I used Redhat, apm would send out a message and kwrited would pick it up and warn me of impending doom. There are two ways to fix this. In /etc/conf.d/apmd put '-W' in the APMD_OPTS or make some syslogger pick up on ALERT level messages. Since gentoo has options for different sysloggers, I figure the apmd -W way is cleaner and better. (That is how it was done in Redhat (and Fedora)). However, perhaps other programs use the ALERT level too, so making the ALERT level write uses may be helpful. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run computer 2. let battery run out 3. no real warnings Actual Results: No real warnings (except faint beep) Expected Results: Preferably some sort of message pops up Portage 2.0.51 (default-x86-2004.2, gcc-3.3.4, glibc-2.3.3.20040420-r1, 2.4.26-gentoo-r9 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.4.26-gentoo-r9 i686 Pentium III (Coppermine) Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16 distcc 2.16 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [disabled] ccache version 2.3 [disabled] Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r4 Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r1 Binutils: sys-devel/binutils-2.14.90.0.8-r1 Headers: sys-kernel/linux-headers-2.4.21-r1 Libtools: sys-devel/libtool-1.5.2-r5 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.2/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/env /usr/kde/3.3/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/shutdown /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs distlocks sandbox" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.osuosl.org http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="X acpi aim alsa apm arts avi berkdb bitmap-fonts bonobo cdparanoia cdr crypt cups dga dio directfb doc dvd encode esd f77 fbcon foomaticdb gdbm gif gpm gtk gtk2 gtkhtml guile imlib java jpeg kde ldap libg++ libwww mad mikmod mmx motif mozcalendar mozdevelop mozilla mozsvg mozxmlterm mpeg mysql ncurses nls objc oggvorbis opengl oss pam pcmcia pdflib perl pic plotutils png python qt quicktime readline samba sdl slang spell sse ssl svga tcltk tcpd tetex tiff truetype x86 xine xml2 xmms xprint xv zlib"
You are free to add the -W flag yourself if you wish apmd to have that behavior.