GNOME Power Manager supports merging multiple laptop batteries into one virtual battery for the time remaining calculation and also the status area icon. Unfortunately my new statistical driven approach breaks with primary batteries being removed and inserted, as we'll need some sort of profiles for “one battery” or “one battery plus extra battery” just to make the new code work. Unfortunately, my Lenovo only has the one battery, with no option to extend it. Now, long shot: Does anybody have an old laptop that they do not want that they could send to me? It would need to have two batteries expressed in ACPI (with at least 10 minutes of charge in both), with the ability to remove one at run-time. It doesn't matter if the machine is 400MHz with a smashed screen, any old test machine would be great. If I get my hands on a multi-battery laptop, then the new profile code work will work really well with two batteries. Sorry if this sounds cheeky, but it's really hard to code for a situation you can't test for.
Multiple battery devices
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hughsie
Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food. View all posts by hughsie
I think you do great and important work so I'd love to help out but I don't have a laptop I can send you however I will offer to chip in to buy you one. I'm sure we can find one on ebay.co.uk that fits the requirements.