12 replies to this topic

[feend]

Are you using ACPI or APM for power management? I'm having some trouble getting eirther working. Has anybody had a similar experience? If so how did you finally fix it?

I'm going to bump my kernel up to 2.4.20rc1 and apply the acpi patch...hopefully that'll allow apps like klaptop to recognize that I have a battery .

[ntheory]

I use APM. At one point my laptop would poweroff on its own, but not anymore (it was a short-lived stint that came out of nowhere). So basically the only thing that it does for me is make the processor go into pseudo-sleep mode while it's not working very hard (I think it issues HLT instructions when it is idle, that's it).

Can you "cat /proc/apm"? If you can, that's a good start to getting battery aware apps running.

[feend]

ntheory: yeah I was using apm support but it didn't seem to work so well . If I would try to suspend it would freeze up. Also with APM when KDE would load up it would report the battery having a -1% charge which is definitely incorrect.

Are you able to view the amount of charge left in the battery on your machine?

[ntheory]

Yeah, I only do it on the command line though. I've been thinking of writing a monitor app (if the ones out there don't work).

If you're really stuck I'll throw together something that parses out the /proc/apm stuff and displays it in X. It'll also tell you if you're connected to AC power or not via convenient (yeah, right!) hex numbers.

[feend]

Heh well I applied all the patches and stuff and now ACPI works...kinda.

The main reason I wanted power management was to monitor battery use but it's kind of cracked out. This laptop uses an athlon xp with powernow. In windows it's rated at near 3 hours of battery life. I've been using it now on battery power for about 20 minutes and on a full charge the battery monitor is saying I have an hour and forty four minutes left .

That doesn't sound right...

[kid_e]

What distro are you using? And what kind of notebook is it?

The other bonus to getting ACPI working is CPU throttling and being able to shut the cooling fan off when it's not needed.

[hacnslash]

WTF!?!?! why is this in test posts?? it wasnt before!! why was it moved??

[StankDawg]

it was here all along. I was wondering myself why it was here. I will bump this to the UNIX area.

[hacnslash]

sorry for exploding like that, I thought this was in the unix forum before, oops....
anyway, the move to unix was good...

[feend]

Heh oops. I thought I posted in off-topic but I guess I misclicked .

kid_e: I'm using Slack9 on a SONY VAIO PCG-FR130. The Linux support on this laptop kicks ass other than the power management issues I'm having.

I've been googling and I guess the VAIO's don't report power change events to the kernel.

There is a patch available but when I tried it one of the hunks failed. So now I'm reduced to trying to edit apm.c myself and praying make bzImage doesn't spit back any errors .

But hey it's still better than the bitch slapping you receive from Windows. The Windows EULA should say "click here if you agree to sell your soul".

[hacnslash]

But hey it's still better than the bitch slapping you receive from Windows. The Windows EULA should say "click here if you agree to sell your soul".

Amen to that. i am working on freeing myself of windows shit. I am going to format my windows partition as soon as I have photoshop 7 running under wine (no, i am not dissin gimp, its just as good, im just more familiar with photoshop). BTW anybody know how to do it, it is friggin imposisble. I know I should start a new topic on this, but screw it/

I start the installer setup.exe and the installer loads up, then it gives me an error saying I have win nt 4.0 and that I should have service pack 6 installed. I tried all the winver options, but none work...is there some line in the config file I should edit or something??

[feend]

Hmm the installer for what?

[hacnslash]

i said it was photoshop 7, if you read the post carefully it should be in there somewhere....