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kyoki

Member

Registered: 2011-12-05

Posts: 10

xfce4 power manager does not recognize laptop running on battery

Hi all,
I am using a HP G62 laptop and I've recently switched from gnome 3.4 to xfce 4.10 which works quite good. However the xfce4 power manager causes some headaches. I know that my battery is not the best around, but gnome power manager let me work for about an hour which is reasonably well for my purposes. However xfce4 power management did cut that time down to almost 20 minutes, which is NOT nice.
The only clue I get is that the systray icon tells me the laptop is running on AC although it actually runs on battery (it does tell me that my battery charge is going down, though).

I installed laptop-mode-tools and acpid (I know acpid and xfce4-power-manager might be interfering), but that did not solve anything, even when I stopped xfce4-power-manager and ran on acpid alone. I found some messages like these:

Jun  9 09:11:00 localhost logger: ACPI action undefined: PNP0C0A:00
Jun  9 09:13:14 localhost logger: ACPI group/action undefined: PNP0C14:00 / 00000080

also, laptop-mode-tools prints messages like this one:

Jun  9 09:16:13 localhost laptop-mode: Warning: Configuration file /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/board-specific/*.conf is not readable, skipping.

but I don't know if they are related.

I am a bit busy at the moment so I will probably not answer within the next 3-4 hours but any help is really appreciated.

regards,
kyoki

KingX

Member

From: CA

Registered: 2010-03-24

Posts: 324

Re: xfce4 power manager does not recognize laptop running on battery

You can still use gnome power manager if it works for you. If battery life is the issue this is a good thread to sift through. Also, have you looked into cpu frequency scaling?

kyoki

Member

Registered: 2011-12-05

Posts: 10

Re: xfce4 power manager does not recognize laptop running on battery

Thanks for the reply! I already use dynamic frequency scaling (running the "ondemand" governor). I tried the method described in your first link and it seems to work (I'm not sure yet). xfce4-power-manager now recognizes the laptop running on battery if I restart after pulling the AC plug (but not during runtime), which is definitely an improvement. I will run a battery test sometime in the afternoon and post the result.

regards,
kyoki

kyoki

Member

Registered: 2011-12-05

Posts: 10

Re: xfce4 power manager does not recognize laptop running on battery

hm... unfortunately this does not really solve things for me, although it does prolong the battery life time (but not as much as expected). Without doing anything, battery charge went down to about 35% within half an hour. Maybe I go back using gnome-power-manager, although I don't really want all those gnome dependencies on my system.

If anyone has other ideas, feel free to post them!

regards,
kyoki

Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: xfce4 power manager does not recognize laptop running on battery

I am not sure what xfce-power-manager uses behind the scenes, but you might want to look up the wiki pages for the following and see if any of them help

laptop-mode-tools, pm-utils, acpid

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kyoki

Member

Registered: 2011-12-05

Posts: 10

Re: xfce4 power manager does not recognize laptop running on battery

Thanks for the advice, however I already read those articles (maybe not thoroughly enough?). laptop-mode-tools work fine, they immediately switch to the correct mode and power things down nicely once I run the laptop on battery. I also installed pm-utils and acpid (which tends to interfere with power managers of e.g. gnome or xfce). It is just that xfce-power-manager (and gnome-power-manager, too; I noticed that recently when I tried using it again) somehow has problems acquiring information about my power supply.

Nevertheless, I think this might be some general issue with my HP laptop since I already had those problems when running Ubuntu (about one and a half years ago). Specifically, when I run acpi, I get something like this:

Battery 0: Full, 100%, rate information unavailable

[EDIT] The battery was actually full - the charge percentage always seemed to be correct, but I don't get any rate information.

which always bugged me.

regards,
kyoki

Last edited by kyoki (2012-06-10 11:08:45)