Arch Linux

souls-seb

Member

Registered: 2006-09-30

Posts: 26

HAL reports erroneous battery state info

My gnome-power-manager has never given me the correct battery information. I found out that it gets information through HAL, so I ran lshal -m and compared it with the correct information from acpi.

Screenshot

It seems that HAL never reports any battery charge changes, only when I plug/unplug the AC. Except when the charge drops below 50%, HAL reports a charge of 0%.
Also, HAL always reports a time remaining of 1 hour and never updates it, except when the true charge drops below 50%, where the property is removed (why is that?). gnome-power-manager still displays 1 hour though.

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L20.
The acpid daemon is loaded before HAL.

It is pretty annoying that I have to type acpi in the console to keep an eye on the battery, instead of the system telling me when I have to save

I don't know if this is related, but if I have any kind of cpu throttler activated, the WLAN will stop working when the AC is removed. Scanning works fine, but I cannot associate with anything.
Resuming from suspend/hibernate does not work either.

Daren

Member

From: Notts, UK

Registered: 2006-01-02

Posts: 73

Re: HAL reports erroneous battery state info

Hi,

I had a similiar thing with the battery state, though on KDE, and a different make of laptop.

I had to put ec_burst=1 in the kernel loader line in grub, for the battery to be read properly.

Hope that helps.

Daren

souls-seb

Member

Registered: 2006-09-30

Posts: 26

Re: HAL reports erroneous battery state info

Hi,

I had a similiar thing with the battery state, though on KDE, and a different make of laptop.

I had to put ec_burst=1 in the kernel loader line in grub, for the battery to be read properly.

Hope that helps.

Daren

Thanks for the help, but it didn't change a thing  :cry:

bangkok_manouel

Member

From: indicates a starting point

Registered: 2005-02-07

Posts: 1,556

Re: HAL reports erroneous battery state info

You may check this post

Cheers

souls-seb

Member

Registered: 2006-09-30

Posts: 26

Re: HAL reports erroneous battery state info

Thanks, but I don't think that it'll fix my problem. Everything in /proc/acpi/ works as it should.

I'll try step 7 to see if I get any warnings however. When I get time.

wizzard

Member

From: PA, US

Registered: 2006-10-17

Posts: 33

Re: HAL reports erroneous battery state info

I have the same problem, but here's a workaround from the gnome manual

        You can check that your battery is detected by HAL using the command
    hal-device-manager. If your battery is not detected
    by HAL or the wrong information is being reported, you can attempt to
    disable the HAL backend by setting a GConf key.
     
       Select Configuration Editor from the
       Applications menu, under
       System Tools. Search for the key value
       OAFIID:GNOME_BattstatApplet which should be located in
       the path /apps/panel/applets.
     
       Assuming the path is /apps/panel/applets/applet_1.
       In /apps/panel/applets/applet_1/prefs add a
       New Key... called no_hal
       and set it to the boolean value of true. This will disable the usage of
       HAL (see Section  ― Determining the backend to learn how
       to check this).