If you run ZeroShell on a laptop and want to read battery status the following command reveals a lot of battery data:
grep ” /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/*
or this file contains most of the above information in a single file…
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/uevent
Similarly you can tell some information about the power coming into the laptop with this file..
/sys/class/power_supply/ACAD
I expect you could make your own alerting scripts to add to the alerting module to tell you if the laptop has lost mains power or is running low on battery etc.