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#1 2007-09-01 15:57:23

kandalf
Member
Registered: 2007-06-10
Posts: 31

Battery Monitor

Hi everybody, I'm using Arch in a brand new laptop with a Mobile Intel 965PM/GM Express Chipset and I cant get the battery monitor to work.
In my KDE Control Center, when I try to turn this on, this message is shown:

Your computer seems to have a partial ACPI installation. ACPI was probably enabled, but some of the sub-options were not - you need to enable at least 'AC Adaptor' and 'Control Method Battery' and then rebuild your kernel.

I've loaded battery, ac, thermal, button and processor, but still not working

Do I really need to recompile the kernel? Is there any solution to this?

Thanx a lot in advance.


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#2 2007-09-01 16:35:05

Shaika-Dzari
Member
From: Québec, Canada
Registered: 2006-04-14
Posts: 436
Website

Re: Battery Monitor

You should tell us the kind of laptop you used... Dell, Asus, etc...?

I use powersave to monitor my batterie and to scale my cpu. smile

@+

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#3 2007-09-01 17:01:16

kandalf
Member
Registered: 2007-06-10
Posts: 31

Re: Battery Monitor

Sorry, I'm using an LG E500 series.


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#4 2007-09-01 17:26:23

fwojciec
Member
Registered: 2007-05-20
Posts: 1,411

Re: Battery Monitor

If ACPI functionalities are missing or are otherwise not operational this might mean that your laptop has a buggy ACPI bios.  This thread on Gentoo forums might be of use for you if that is the case: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=122145.
I've fixed a buggy DSDT in one of my laptops using this howto so it's doable, but it's not the most straight forward of procedures, it involves debugging some code, recompiling the kernel with custom dsdt patch and such...

Does ACPI work fine with other Linux distros on this laptop?

Last edited by fwojciec (2007-09-01 17:27:02)

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#5 2007-09-01 17:37:36

kandalf
Member
Registered: 2007-06-10
Posts: 31

Re: Battery Monitor

fwojciec wrote:

Does ACPI work fine with other Linux distros on this laptop?

I haven't tried that enough yet, I only booted from Slax and the battery monitor is shown in KDE, so I think it is an Arch problem


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#6 2007-09-01 18:34:35

elliott
Member
Registered: 2006-03-07
Posts: 296

Re: Battery Monitor

Try reading the temperature directly from /proc.

cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature

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#7 2007-09-01 19:04:04

kandalf
Member
Registered: 2007-06-10
Posts: 31

Re: Battery Monitor

elliott wrote:

Try reading the temperature directly from /proc.

cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature

I can read the temperature, and some info about CPU's but not about battery, I have a partially functional ACPI


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#8 2007-09-01 19:11:43

fwojciec
Member
Registered: 2007-05-20
Posts: 1,411

Re: Battery Monitor

Another suggestion I'd have would be to try a different kernel, maybe mm from unstable just for debugging purposes...  With 2.6.22 kernels one of my laptops acts up all the time, especially ACPI related stuff .  I've not experienced any such problems with either 2.6.21 or the rc versions of 2.6.23 kernels.  Just a thought.

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#9 2007-09-01 19:36:00

kandalf
Member
Registered: 2007-06-10
Posts: 31

Re: Battery Monitor

Another suggestion I'd have would be to try a different kernel, maybe mm from unstable just for debugging purposes...

I'm installing now the kernel26mm from unstable. I'll try this, because I tried recompiling DSDT and, even when there were only warnings and were fixed until there were no more, it didn't work.

I'll let you know what happens.


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#10 2007-09-01 20:33:54

kandalf
Member
Registered: 2007-06-10
Posts: 31

Re: Battery Monitor

Ok, I'm on kernel26mm from unstable repositories and I have some more acpi funcitonality such as battery monitor! But I think it's still no fully functional because in KDE Control Center, in the Power/Control Tab says "You may need to enable ACPI suspend/resume on the ACPI Panel even when it is enabled.
However is better than it was before. I hope the pass of this kernel from unstable to testing don't take too long, because I really need a compatible kernel with kqemu and other stuff.
With this kernel I experience some troubles when tried to grom from X to console, this action freezes the laptop giving me no option but a hard reset from the power button.

Anyways, thanx everybody for your help. I was really useful.

Cheers.


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#11 2007-09-01 20:48:38

fwojciec
Member
Registered: 2007-05-20
Posts: 1,411

Re: Battery Monitor

The mm kernel has been pretty unstable on my laptop in the past, so be warned.  Compiling kernels in Arch is easy so I would recommend compiling a custom 2.6.21 kernel or 2.6.23-rc5 for example and using that for now, at least until 2.6.23 kernel is here.  When I had problems with my laptop a kept a bunch of different kernels around just in case, and the 2.6.21 kernel was the most reliable of them all, though I also didn't have any issues with 2.6.23-rc3 kernel - I just didn't use it for very long, that's all.  I don't know if you have had a chance to use ABS and makepkg yet, but if not check out the wiki - they are great tools that make customizing and compiling kernels very easy (you can just use the Arch kernel PKGBUILD from ABS as a template, and just add your own changes to it).

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#12 2007-09-01 21:25:40

kandalf
Member
Registered: 2007-06-10
Posts: 31

Re: Battery Monitor

The mm kernel has been pretty unstable on my laptop in the past, so be warned.

Thanx is good to know that.

Compiling kernels in Arch is easy so I would recommend compiling a custom 2.6.21 kernel or 2.6.23-rc5 for example and using that for now

Where should I get the sources? from kernel.org? or somewhere in Arch site?

I think I'll try this option, because after try mm kernel for a while I realized that is too unstable and I can't use a kernel like that because I need reliability from my laptop now.


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#13 2007-09-01 22:00:57

fwojciec
Member
Registered: 2007-05-20
Posts: 1,411

Re: Battery Monitor

OK, this is how I compile kernels (sorry, too lazy to type it all out again, so I'll just paste what I've posted before in another thread):

1) Update abs ("sudo abs" or run "abs" as root)
2) Copy the kernel26 directory from /var/abs/kernels to my home dir ("~/Sources" actually)
3) I use the script from this thread (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=34815).  Make sure you configure it appropriately, choose appendname etc., and make it executable.  Then just run it from the directory where you copied your kernel to (in my case ~/Sources).  It should make a new directory called kernel26-"appendname".  Enter that directory.
4) If you want to add custom patches you'll have to edit PKGBUILD file manually, otherwise just run makepkg.  The script changes the PKGBUILD so that you'll enter kernel configuration menu before compiling starts.  Make your changes and make sure you save your configuration when choosing exit.
5) While the kernel compiles you can edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst to add entries for your new kernel.  The relevant filenames will be vmlinuz26-"appendname", kernel26-"appendname", and kernel26-"appendname"-fallback.
6) run sudo pacman -A kernel_package_name

That would get you a custom compiled and custimized kernel from current... You will need to do a bit more, since your goal will be to build a different version.

It would be probably good to read what the wiki says about ABS and makepkg, so you get the sense of how it all works, I would probably also check out the wiki on how to downgrade packages...  PKGBUILD is essentially a set of instructions for building from source, so it will take care of everything from downloading sources to making a package that can be later installed with pacman.  You would have to edit the PKGBUILD created by the script in the above example to tell the script which version of sources to use and such, and probably also fix things like md5sums, versions of patches, or even get rid of some patches if they are not important for you.  It takes a while to figure all the details out, but once you learn the procedure it's all very easy.

You can also look up the differences between different kernel PKGBUILDs using the CVS part of the website.  Here is a link to the differences between the current and the last 2.6.21 kernel PKGBUILD: http://cvs.archlinux.org/cgi-bin/viewcv … f_format=h

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