1. What is it? A plugin to indicate the status of the IBM Hard Drive Active Protection System, or HDAPS. 2. Requirements As of Linux kernel 2.6.28, a kernel patch is no longer required to support the HDAPS functionality. As a result, this plugin will only (officially) support kernels newer than 2.6.28. It will also only (officially) support the hdaps module provided by the tp_smapi project. The tp_smapi module is currently recommended by the hdaps devs, so you should be using it. In the future, the in-tree module will probably be supported as well. Finally, you'll need to be running hdapsd (HDAPS daemon) if you'd like the plugin to do anything. The HDAPS daemon is what updates sysfs with the readings from the hdaps module. Get it here: http://repo.or.cz/w/hdapsd.git 3. Installation I think it builds like most XFCE panel plugins. Git users, run './autogen.sh' in the project directory, and hopefully it will do whatever it does to make your project directory look like the tarball release. If it does (or if you just downloaded the tarball), run, ./configure make With any luck, you will have a libhdaps.so module in your panel-plugin/.libs/ directory. There should also be an hdaps.desktop file in the panel-plugin directory. You need to copy these to the directories where XFCE keeps such things. For example, the system-wide desktop file location on Gentoo is /usr/share/xfce4/panel/plugins/, and the module itself goes in /usr/lib/xfce4/panel/plugins/. 4. Settings 4a. Poll Frequency This is the frequency with which the plugin checks the status of HDAPS. If you set it to 500ms (the default), it will check every half second and update the icon according to what it finds. 4b. Device Name The name of the device whose HDAPS status you wish to monitor. This will almost certainly be a hard drive, and will most likely be "sda". With any luck, the plugin will auto-detect the supported devices on your system. If you have more than one supported device, you will need to select it on the configuration dialog. 5. How to report bugs Email them to me at michael@orlitzky.com.