Xfce4 Power Manager Icon Missing?

Recently, I installed Lubuntu 11.10 (a netbook-optimized version of Ubuntu) on my wife’s netbook at Lifehacker’s suggestion. And wow–did it make an incredible difference. It’s like a brand new machine compared to Windows 7 running on it, which was getting unbearably slow.

While Lubuntu will look and act pretty familiar to anyone born and raised on Windows, I wanted to make sure when I handed the netbook back to her, she was as comfortable as possible. That meant configuring, among other things, the power management. (Lubuntu wasn’t putting the machine to sleep when the lid was closed by default.)

First, I had to make the power manager run on startup. To do this, you go to:

Menu (think Start Menu) > System Tools > Desktop Session Settings.

Here, you’ll see a number of items. Power Manager should be pretty close to the top. Check the Enabled box, hit OK, then restart.

Now you’ll see a familiar battery icon in the system tray. Yay! Right-click on that to find its preferences, like how long until the computer sleeps, what happens when power buttons are pressed and when the lid is closed, etc.

Back to that missing icon…

Anyhow, during my experiments, I accidentally set the power manager’s system tray icon to “Never show icon”. And there was no link to it under the System Tools or Preferences Panel. How the heck was I supposed to get it back? After too much searching, I finally discovered you can run the settings panel from the command line. Open up the terminal (in Lubuntu it’s under Menu > Accessories > LXTerminal). Now type this in and mash enter:

xfce4-power-manager-settings

The settings panel will appear. Breathe sigh of relief and continue.

Update:

Commenter Marc shares how to make the power manager’s settings panel appear in the Menu (Start Menu-esque Thing).

If you want to find an entry in the menu, you’ll have to edit /usr/share/applications/xfce4-power-manager-settings.desktop. Change:

OnlyShowIn=XFCE;

to

OnlyShowIn=XFCE;LXDE;