UPower is an open source and completely free command-line software implemented in C and designed to be used for enumerating power devices, querying statistics and history, as well as to listen to device events.
After installation, UPower will implement a org.freedesktop.UPower service, which is accessible by any other service or application on the system via the system message bus.
However, keep in mind that some operations, such as suspending the system, are restricted using PolicyKit. UPower was previously known as DeviceKit-power, and it comes pre-installed on major Linux operating systems, including Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE.
Command-line options
Various command-line options are available, among which we can mention the ability to enumerate object paths for devices, to dump all parameters for all objects, to get the wakeup data, to monitor activity from the power daemon, to monitor with detail, as well as to display detailed information about an object path.
Getting started with UPower
As mentioned, UPower can be found in various distributions of Linux, either pre-installed or ready for installation as a pre-built binary package in the main software repositories of the respective distros.
If UPower is not available for your GNU/Linux operating system, you can easily install it using the source package distributed on Softpedia and on the project’s homepage (see link at the end of the article).
To install it, download the package by clicking the dedicated download button above, save it on your computer, extract its contents with an archive manager utility, open a terminal emulator, use the ‘cd’ command to go to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/upower-0.99.2), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.
