can't use battery applet

[bengladwell]

Hi. I'm not able to use the KDE battery monitor applet. There seems to be some confusion in Yoper about ACPI. I'm running yoper 2.1 on a Dell Inspiron.

When I try to enable the applet in the "laptop battery" section of the KDE control center, I see a message about ACPI only being partially enabled and that I need to recompile the kernel with at least battery and ac options.

I saw another post (probably addressing an older version) that recommended typing:
modprobe battery
modprobe ac

These did not produce any errors and when I went back to KDE control center, I could now access the options under laptop battery. However, the applet still does not appear.

Here are some ACPI lines in dmesg:
...
Dell Inspiron with broken BIOS detected. Refusing to enable the local APIC.
ACPI: RSDP (v000 DELL ) @ 0x000f41a0
ACPI: RSDT (v001 DELL CPi R 0x27d10705 ASL 0x00000061) @ 0x0fff0000
ACPI: FADT (v001 DELL CPi R 0x27d10705 ASL 0x00000061) @ 0x0fff0400
ACPI: DSDT (v001 INT430 SYSFexxx 0x00001001 MSFT 0x0100000d) @ 0x00000000
ACPI: PM-Timer IO Port: 0x808
...
ACPI: Subsystem revision 20040326
ACPI: IRQ9 SCI: Edge set to Level Trigger.
ACPI: Interpreter enabled
ACPI: Using PIC for interrupt routing
ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (00:00)
PCI: Probing PCI hardware (bus 00)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0._PRT]
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 *11 12 14 15)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs 3 4 *5 6 7 9 10 11 12 14 15)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 14 15) *0, disabled.
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 *11 12 14 15)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.AGP_._PRT]
ACPI: Power Resource [PADA] (on)
...

There are more lines similar to above having to do with PCI interrupts.

I've installed a couple other distros (ubuntu, mandrake, mepis) that have no problem running that battery applet.

Any ideas?
Thanks.

[bengladwell]

Well, I got no replies here, but I foudn the answer anyway. Good thing yoper.com is back up.

The kernel modules are already compiled with the original kernel. They're just not loaded.

You have to
# modprobe ac
# modprobe battery

Put those commands in a simple script that sits in /etc/rc5.d (and any other run level you want) and it the battery applet starts up.

If you are already in KDE and you type those commands into a terminal, your battery applet won't start. KDE has to start after those modules are loaded. That's why in /etc/rc5.d, you want to name your script S30scriptname. The kde startup script is named S99kdm. Any script that you put in there (don't forget to make it executable) that you want to run before KDE should be named with S<number lower than 99> like S30scriptname.

If you want to test it out, log out of kde and log in to a plain command line session. Type those modprobe commands and then log back into KDE (all with out rebooting). The battery applet will work.

One more thing. There are other acpi modules that you can load up in your script. The ones that I included are
modprobe fan
modprobe processor
modprobe button
modprobe thermal

I'm don't know if this is all of the power control modules available or even what they do. I'm thinking that they have to do with enabling your computer to fall into hibernate or standby or whatever when certain conditions are met (like your processor gets too hot or something).

[JayBoogie]

i have xp and yoper on my dell but xp is inaccessible due to a major flub up on my part. anyway i wanted to install yoper on another partition because it has the 2.6 kernel which is sweet for backing up files off of xp partitiions. fortunatly i have all of them in one place and it should be easy...if only i could manage to get yoper to boot after instsall....since u seem to have pulled this off successfully maybe you could help???????????????????????

[sarumont]

You have to
# modprobe ac
# modprobe battery

Put those commands in a simple script that sits in /etc/rc5.d (and any other run level you want) and it the battery applet starts up.

You can just add those modules that you want loaded at boot to your /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6.

i have xp and yoper on my dell but xp is inaccessible due to a major flub up on my part. anyway i wanted to install yoper on another partition because it has the 2.6 kernel which is sweet for backing up files off of xp partitiions. fortunatly i have all of them in one place and it should be easy...if only i could manage to get yoper to boot after instsall....since u seem to have pulled this off successfully maybe you could help???????????????????????

Please don't hijack threads.