I often work with my laptop @ home connected by ac but without battery. When gdesklets is executed during GNOME startup an error message is displayed that says your desklet-battery sensor could not be initialized and is probably broken. I know this is not a bug of gentoo (ebuild, software condition....) but of the desklet source. I don't know phyton so if someone could just add a line or to to simply not let the desklet crash if no battery is present I would be very pleased. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.emerge desklet-battery 2.remove battery (work on ac) 3.restart desklet or launch gdesklets Actual Results: desklet crash Expected Results: showed "no battery present" Laptop: IBM Thinkpad T40p Portage 2.0.50-r10 (default-x86-2004.2, gcc-3.3.4, glibc-2.3.3.20040420-r1, 2.6.8-gentoo-r3) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.8-gentoo-r3 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1600MHz Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16 Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r4 Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r1 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs ccache 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="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="X aalib acl acpi alsa avi berkdb cdr crypt cups directfb dvd encode esd foomaticdb gdbm gif gnome gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 imlib ipv6 java jpeg kerberos ldap libg++ libwww mad mikmod mmx motif mozilla mpeg mysql ncurses nls nptl oggvorbis opengl oss pam pdflib perl png python quicktime readline samba sdl slang snmp spell sse ssl svga tcpd tiff truetype wmf x86 xml2 xmms xv zlib"
I really don't have time to patch all of the unworking desklets and keep up with them unfortunately. If you can patch this yourself, or report it to the upstream maintainer, as the best solution. That way we don't have to backport fixes, and I can simply update the version in portage when the maintainer fixes the source. Please post any information from the maintainer here so we can track it. Thanks for your report.
This is a problem of the desklet creator. Also, the desklet uses sensors, which have been deprecated as of late.