Battery Meter Question

[oxf]

Has anyone else had this issue with the Battery Meter?

I had it with my Laptop (HP Compaq Presario) in Hardy and it still exists now with Jaunty. I must admit I've never spent much time investigating it until now. It would be good to fix if I can.

Basically the issue is this. While the Battery indicator/meter appears to function when I run the pointer over the battery icon it's unable to give me any information on the battery status.

Eg right now I'm on AC power: msg is
"computer is running on AC power. Battery state could not be read at this time. Battery charge time is currently unknown"

When running on battery a similar type of message is displayed aloong the lines of "0%". I'm wondering if anyone else gets this? and if its a bug with a fix .....or...simply something I've done wrong?

Mike

[rokytnji]

One thing you can try is to open synaptic package manager and see if

acpi
and
acpi-tools

is installed.

[oxf]

One thing you can try is to open synaptic package manager and see if

acpi
and
acpi-tools

is installed.

Interesting you should say that! I was running update manager after I posted this earlier this evening and came across ACPI and wondered about it.

ACPID "utilities for power management" is installed but none of the other ACPI's are. I'll try that and report back. Thanks
Mike

[oxf]

One thing you can try is to open synaptic package manager and see if

acpi
and
acpi-tools

is installed.

Unfortunately that didn't do it. Still cant display battery state. Is there anything else I could try?
I see there are some other ACPI related packages, library etc that list in Synaptic. Should I try any of these. I'm reluctant to start installing stuff at random unless recomended though!

Mike

[Kieren]

I've never seen this problem on a laptop running Ubuntu. Is it possible there is a problem with the battery itself?

[Segfault]

Is it possible acpid is not running? I'd have a closer look at dmesg.

[oxf]

Is it possible acpid is not running? I'd have a closer look at dmesg.

I dont think its the battery since it reports OK in windows.

dmesg reveals an awful lot of suff! including various chunks of ACPI. Is there anything in particular I should focus on?

Thanks
Mike

[oxf]

Is it possible acpid is not running? I'd have a closer look at dmesg.

Well here's the ACPI related entries. Of course there's a lot more than these so may have missed something.

[ 0.560002] ACPI: bus type pci registered
[ 0.560002] PCI: MCFG configuration 0: base e0000000 segment 0 buses 0 - 4
[ 0.560002] PCI: Not using MMCONFIG.
[ 0.560002] PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfd8bc, last bus=5
[ 0.560002] PCI: Using configuration type 1 for base access
[ 0.560002] ACPI: EC: Look up EC in DSDT
[ 0.561535] ACPI: Interpreter enabled
[ 0.561542] ACPI: (supports S0 S3 S4 S5)
[ 0.561561] ACPI: Using IOAPIC for interrupt routing
[ 0.561714] PCI: MCFG configuration 0: base e0000000 segment 0 buses 0 - 4
[ 0.562480] ACPI: EC: non-query interrupt received, switching to interrupt mode
[ 0.562616] PCI: MCFG area at e0000000 reserved in ACPI motherboard resources
[ 0.562616] PCI: Using MMCONFIG for extended config space
[ 0.572210] ACPI: EC: GPE = 0x18, I/O: command/status = 0x66, data = 0x62
[ 0.572213] ACPI: EC: driver started in interrupt mode
[ 0.572318] ACPI: No dock devices found.
[ 0.572328] ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (0000:00)

[ 0.573905] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0._PRT]
[ 0.574091] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.P2P_._PRT]
[ 0.574251] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.AGP_._PRT]
[ 0.575913] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 10 11) *0, disabled.
[ 0.576050] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs 10 11) *0, disabled.
[ 0.576180] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 10 11) *0, disabled.
[ 0.576311] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 10 11) *0, disabled.
[ 0.576441] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKE] (IRQs 10 11) *0, disabled.
[ 0.576572] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKF] (IRQs 10 11) *0, disabled.
[ 0.576699] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKG] (IRQs 10 11) *0, disabled.
[ 0.576826] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKH] (IRQs 10 11) *0, disabled.
[ 0.576963] ACPI: WMI: Mapper loaded

[ 0.577483] ACPI: bus type pnp registered
[ 0.578235] pnp 00:09: mem resource (0x0-0xfff) overlaps 0000:01:05.0 BAR 6 (0x0-0x1ffff), disabling
[ 0.581116] pnp: PnP ACPI: found 10 devices
[ 0.581118] ACPI: ACPI bus type pnp unregistered
[ 0.581121] PnPBIOS: Disabled by ACPI PNP

[ 1.353058] ACPI: EC: missing confirmations, switch off interrupt mode.

[ 2.024157] pciehp: PCI Express Hot Plug Controller Driver version: 0.4
[ 2.026838] ACPI: AC Adapter [ACAD] (on-line)
[ 2.113768] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)
[ 2.113851] input: Power Button (FF) as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXPWRBN:00/input/input0
[ 2.113854] ACPI: Power Button (FF) [PWRF]
[ 2.113904] input: Power Button (CM) as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0C0C:00/input/input1
[ 2.113906] ACPI: Power Button (CM) [PWRB]
[ 2.113954] input: Sleep Button (CM) as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0C0E:00/input/input2
[ 2.113956] ACPI: Sleep Button (CM) [SLPB]
[ 2.114003] input: Lid Switch as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0C0D:00/input/input3
[ 2.115404] ACPI: Lid Switch [LID]
[ 2.115555] ACPI: CPU0 (power states: C1[C1] C2[C2])
[ 2.115584] processor ACPI_CPU:00: registered as cooling_device0
[ 2.115588] ACPI: Processor [CPU0] (supports 8 throttling states)
[ 2.119154] thermal LNXTHERM:01: registered as thermal_zone0
[ 2.121486] ACPI: Thermal Zone [THRM] (63 C)

[rokytnji]

2.113768] ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)

That means that your battery is being recognised by acpi. I don't run Ubuntu on a Laptop with a battery. I run Lighter distros like AntiX and Fluxbox Mint on my Laptops and they use Conky which is highly customizable for giving readouts. I use conky to read my battery state on my laptops besides other things like link strength, kernel version,ram usage,hardrive space, plus a lot of other stuff. It is not easy to setup and use though for a new Linux user.

You are using the battery applet from the top task bar, right. Is there a properties button when you right click the applet? I think you need to tell it to read Bat1.

Edit: forgot to mention. Open up synaptic first and search for

apm

and see if it is installed and if not install it also.

[Segfault]

Right, kernel has ACPI battery support enabled, we still don't know if acpid is listening for events.

ps ax | grep acpid

This should tell us whether the daemon is running.