Version: (using KDE 4.4.2) Compiler: GCC 4.4.3 CFLAGS="-O2 -march=prescott -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -floop-interchange -floop-strip-mine -floop-block" OS: Linux Installed from: Gentoo Packages xorg-server 1.8.0 came out recently and I upgraded my laptop to it. It has a feature that is meant to eliminate the need for hal by replacing it with udev, but it seems that I cannot avoid using hal because of a dependency the battery monitor has on it. You can reproduce this by upgrading xorg-server on a laptop to 1.8.0, replacing hal with udev, remove hald from your distribution's run levels, removing hald rom your distribution's run levels, stopping hald if you do not reboot and then starting KDE. If you use the nvidia-drivers, you will likely need to set IgnoreABI in your xorg.conf file in order to get xorg-server to work. When you are in KDE, you should notice that the battery monitor widget can no longer detect a battery. Re-adding hald to the default run level and rebooting seems to workaround this issue. I am not sure if this should be reported as a Bug or a wishlist item.
I can confirm this on a fresh install with xserver 1.9 and 4.5.3. With stopped hal the applet shows a count of 0 CPUs. :-) Restarting hal, even during the same KDE session, brings the count back to 2.
Fixed in 4.6.0 as long as you install upower to replace hald.