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#1 2011-05-14 21:23:13

evilrobotdrew
Member
Registered: 2011-05-14
Posts: 4

Laptop powers off on battery, fine on AC and in Ubuntu liveCD

Hey guys, I just bought this (http://www.ohava.com/index.php?Itemid=1 … &task=view) and installed Arch.

The problem i'm having is that when on battery, the system will power itself off after about 5 to 40 minutes. when i say shutdown, i mean the system simply "dies" like someone had pulled the battery. I can't be sure, but this seems to have started yesterday after I rebooted the laptop, unfortunately i had been playing with it for about 10 hours at work, so there is no telling what I did in that time to break it.


to troubleshoot so far I have:

1) gone through the laptop, cpufreq, and general recommendations pages in the archwiki, installing what should be necessary
2) ran "watch sensors", to see if overheating may be an issue, but it isn't (stays at ~40c)
3) tailed dmesg.log, Xorg.0.log, everything.log, kernel.log and let it power off, no error messages before it shutdown
4) tried disabling the wireless, no effect
5) ensured i'm using the up-to-date video drivers (xf86-driver-intel, mesa, etc. all for my i7's integrated graphics)
6) ran an ubuntu (distro that was pre-installed) livecd, and let the battery drain down to 6%, no shutdowns

the fact that ubuntu had no problems, and that the same symptoms aren't present on AC lead me to think this is a software/configuration issue, but i'm almost out of ideas.

I'm tailing acpid.log now, and i'll let it shutdown again


Any help is appreciated smile

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#2 2011-05-14 21:36:40

evilrobotdrew
Member
Registered: 2011-05-14
Posts: 4

Re: Laptop powers off on battery, fine on AC and in Ubuntu liveCD

nothing in acpid.log except the messages from boot.

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#3 2011-05-15 08:48:53

einhard
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2010-01-05
Posts: 89

Re: Laptop powers off on battery, fine on AC and in Ubuntu liveCD

Which DM are you using? KDE, Gnome, Xfce, LXDE or something else? It's probably battery indicator problem. On my old laptop it was showing 0% for split second after 5-6 minutes and of course this triggered actions for critical battery level. Change your settings in your power management solution (powerdevil, etc.) to do nothing on low and critical levels. Xorg have also separate options for those actions but they should be overridden by DM power managment.

Why this problem doesn't occur on Ubuntu? Probably different kernel/xorg versions. You didn't install/upgrade anything before this issue appeared? You can check this in pacman.log.

Last edited by einhard (2011-05-15 09:09:27)

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#4 2011-05-16 16:17:04

evilrobotdrew
Member
Registered: 2011-05-14
Posts: 4

Re: Laptop powers off on battery, fine on AC and in Ubuntu liveCD

The problem I i had the system set up and rebooted before this problem appeared, I'm leaning toward a video or wireless driver issue (wireless doesn't make sense but wicd causes an occasional kernel panic at boot). The problem could also be cairo-compmgr. after work i'm going to charge it and see if uninstalling the video drivers and wicd made any difference.

I really hate the idea of going with ubuntu or mint, because I like arch, but if it's not playing with my HW then I need to do something.


BTW, sorry about the delay in replying, and thanks for the insights.

I noticed a lot of dependency issues until I updated the mirror list, do you think that that may be a factor (I don't think it would have been)?

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#5 2011-05-17 15:41:08

evilrobotdrew
Member
Registered: 2011-05-14
Posts: 4

Re: Laptop powers off on battery, fine on AC and in Ubuntu liveCD

uninstalling xf86-video-intel causes the problem to go away, reinstalling causes the problem to re-appear

I'm gonna file a bug report, i can't give much in the way output, but prehaps I can help.

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