EOS & Cinnamon, an endeavour in itself (CUPS, Nextcloud, Home Assistant)

[Moonbase59]

Phew. I decided for EOS w/ Cinnamon, out of pure laziness (been using Mint 12+ years). Considering making this not a plaything, but a machine to work with, I decided to fight this through (and learn new things).

It seems EOS defaults to KDE Plasma for a reason—in retrospect, KDE Plasma seems to be much more well-integrated, and it is much better than it was years ago, when I abandoned it.

Anyway, three more tasks done, with lots of looking-things-up and some experimentation:

• CUPS network printer setup (Kyocera Ecosys P2135dn & P5021cdn).
  • In printer, enable IPP and Bonjour.
  • avahi and nss-mdns needed for driverless CUPS
  • don’t forget firewall (I did), allow ipp & mdns
• Nextcloud Contacts, Calendar, Nemo integration (via WebDAV)
  • gnome-online-accounts (extra) & gnome-online-accounts-gtk (AUR)
  • In Nextcloud, under Personal Settings → Security → Devices & Sessions, create new App (I called it “Linux Online Accounts”), note password
  • In EOS Online Accounts, use base server name, not full dav path, i.e. https://cloud.example.com.
  • gnome-keyring (Login/default keyring PW == user PW to avoid extra keyring login when logging in; append password optional pam_gnome_keyring.so in /etc/pam.d/passwd to keep in sync.
  • Calendar & Contacts integration: gnome-calendar, gnome-contacts
  • For Nemo integration, gvfs-dnssd needed! (Otherwise “Cannot mount” error, also enables davs:// links).
• Home Assistant laptop battery sensor: Adapt my Python script below (and put it in crontab [use cronie]). Nice for low battery alarm or switching off charger when full.

Et voilà: Seamless integration with my Nextcloud instance! Perfect printing, Nemo access to Nextcloud storage, Nextcloud Contacts & Calendar all integrated.

Never give up, never surrender! By Grabthar’s Hammer!

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Little Python script (use */1 * * * * in crontab to run every minute) to keep Home Assistant updated on laptop battery status:

EDIT 2025-05-17: Updated script here → EOS & Cinnamon, an endeavour in itself (CUPS, Nextcloud, Home Assistant) - #4 by Moonbase59

I put this in /usr/local/bin/ha-battery-sensor and use this in root’s crontab:

*/1 * * * * /usr/local/bin/ha-battery-sensor > /dev/null 2>&1

A little off-topic, but if you want to do things “right” in Home Assistant, also create a template sensor (using HA’s GUI Helpers) like so:

Then you can enjoy your Linux laptop battery state on your battery panel—here’s mine as an example:

Have fun!

[Stephane]

are you using you script to save and import date about % battery and get history in webdav / nextcloud ?
( webdav / nextcloud can do more others things like backups and other things )
and what about tlp , more https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop#Battery_state

[Moonbase59]

The lil Python script is just for Home Assistant fanatics like me—its only purpose is to update the battery status to HA (which in turn keeps track of the history).

I don’t have tlp installed on this laptop, but the script shouldn’t interfere, I think.

Letting Python’s psutil do the heavy lifting (i.e., what sensor to use on which platform) helps keeping the script OS-independent (it should work on Windoze, macOS, Linux).

My Nextcloud mainly provides contact and calendar data to all my systems (including the router’s phone book). The Nemo integration I sometimes use to quickly swap some files, but the davs: protocol and gvfs have some drawbacks, so I normally use NFS when at home (to my TrueNAS).

[Moonbase59]

Just in case anyone else uses Home Assistant to track their laptop’s battery state: I’ve updated the script above, because Python’s psutil couldn’t detect batteries on some oddball tablets/convertibles/notebooks. Assuming we run Linux on those, I added a fallback to use upower in those cases.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# encoding: utf-8

# ha-battery-sensor
# 2025-03-24 Moonbase59
# 2025-05-16 Moonbase59 - improve battery detection
# 2025-05-17 Moonbase59 - add upower check if psutil fails

from requests import post
import psutil
import json
import socket
import subprocess

# get hostname as device name
device_name = socket.gethostname().split('.')[0]
device_slug = socket.gethostname().split('.')[0].replace('-', '_').casefold()

# Home Assistant URL (use remote URL if it should work outside your local network)
# ha_url = 'http://homeassistant.local:8123'
# ha_url = 'https://homeassistant.example.com'
ha_url = 'https://homeassistant.example.com'

# Home Assistant long-lived accessed token (create one first!)
ha_token = 'very_long_homeassistant_token'

# Create sensor and friendly names
ha_sensor = 'sensor.' + device_slug + '_battery_level'
ha_friendly_name = device_name + ' Battery level'

url = ha_url + '/api/states/' + ha_sensor
headers = {
    'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + ha_token,
    'content-type': 'application/json',
}

# Try psutil first
if hasattr(psutil, "sensors_battery"):
    try:
        percent = psutil.sensors_battery().percent
        charging = psutil.sensors_battery().power_plugged
    except AttributeError:
        battery = False
    else:
        battery = True
else:
    battery = False

# If psutil failed, see if we can get data from upower (if installed)
# This will probably only work on Linux

# shell commands to use for upower (returns 'unknown' if upower isn't installed)
upower_cmd_percent = "command -v upower >/dev/null 2>&1 && upower -i $(upower -e | grep '/battery') | grep --color=never -E percentage|xargs|cut -d' ' -f2|sed s/%// || echo 'unknown'"
upower_cmd_state = "command -v upower >/dev/null 2>&1 && upower -i $(upower -e | grep '/battery') | grep --color=never -E state|xargs|cut -d' ' -f2 || echo 'unknown'"

if battery == False:
    try:
        percent = subprocess.check_output(upower_cmd_percent, shell=True, text=True)
        percent = float(percent.strip())
        state = subprocess.check_output(upower_cmd_state, shell=True, text=True)
        state = state.strip()
        charging = True if state == 'charging' else False
    except:
        battery = False
    else:
        battery = True

# prepare payload
if battery:
    percent = round(percent, 0)
    icon = 'mdi:battery'
    icon0 = 'mdi:battery-outline'
    icon100 = 'mdi:battery'
    if charging:
        icon = "mdi:battery-charging"
        icon0 = "mdi:battery-charging-outline"
        icon100 = "mdi:battery-charging-100"
    step = round(percent / 10) * 10
    if step < 10:
        icon = icon0
    elif step > 90:
        icon = icon100
    else:
        icon = icon + '-' + str(step)
else:
    icon = 'mdi:battery-unknown'
    percent = 'unknown'

payload = {
    'state': str(percent),
    'attributes': {
        'device_class': 'battery',
        'state_class': 'measurement',
        'unit_of_measurement': '%',
        'friendly_name': ha_friendly_name,
        'icon': icon
    }
}

# print(json.dumps(payload))
response = post(url, headers=headers, data = json.dumps(payload))
# print(response.text)

Let me know if it worked for you, or what you had to change.

[IronRod]

This is very interesting for me because: 1) I’m coming to EndeavourOS from five years on LinuxMint, and 2) I’ve been thinking about putting up a NextCloud server. My current server is for media (Plex) and file share (NFS) but it is local network only at this point.

Interestingly, I came to EndeavourOS because I was looking at KDE from a desire to move off of Cinnamon. I don’t like the direction they’re heading with it as manifested in Xia.