Add support for libsmbios

[mbarta]

libsmbios provides access to battery settings as well and works perfectly for my XPS 13. Unfortunately, the current extension doesn't do anything on my system (I have the DCC installed)

Would you consider implementing support for https://github.com/dell/libsmbios/blob/master/src/bin/smbios-battery-ctl as well (maybe configurable for people to chose)?

[vsimkus]

Does DCC work for you if you use it directly? If not, I suppose your laptop isn't supported by DCC then, what's the model?

As for smbios toolkit; I wasn't aware of it so thanks for sharing. My laptop works with both smbios and dcc so it's worth checking it out. Before I do something with the extension, however, I'd need to dig a little to find out the advantages/disadvantages of smbios over dcc and its standing in Dell's roadmap---if you have any info on this, that could be helpful. It seems more general and might work for other OEM laptops, but I struggle to find any list of supported devices.

[mbarta]

Thanks @vsimkus for a quick answer!

I thought dcc wasn't working for me, but updating it to the latest version fixed the problem. Now both dcc and libsmbios commands work in the exact same way for my XPS 13 9310.

I don't have any additional information, but just the fact that libsmbios is part of standard package repositories (at least in Ubuntu and I presume other distributions too), makes it much easier to use your extension, compared to having to get a third-party app from the Dell's webpage.

By the way, I really like the extension, great job! I was looking for exactly this and I'm so glad you made it!

[vsimkus]

Glad you managed to get it to work!

just the fact that libsmbios is part of standard package repositories, makes it much easier to use your extension

Agree. dcc might just be a wrapper for it but I'll need to dig to see if it does anything more than that.

For now, I'll keep using dcc, mostly because I don't have much time right now to do the research. But I'll keep the migration to libsmbios idea for the future in case we see that it is more appropriate or works on more machines.

By the way, I really like the extension, great job! I was looking for exactly this and I'm so glad you made it!

Thanks! Glad you found it useful.