edgy, thinkpad, smapi, extended battery

[Jaime Davila]

Hello all,

I'm trying to find information about the extended battery that I have 
for my thinkpad x40, the type you plug into the bottom of the laptop.

I don't seem to be able to get my laptop to use this additional battery. 
My battery time ends up being the same regardless of this second battery 
being attached or not, and the remaining battery time reported by 
gnome-power-manager doesn't change by removing on putting the battery 
back on.

This added battery has a led on its right side. I imagine the led is 
supposed to light up if everything is OK, but it is staying off right 
now, even after booting up with the battery in place. I remember it used 
to light up. Maybe it stopped lighting up when I upgraded from dapper to 
edgy? I am not certain of that.

I did some online searching, and found that there is a package called 
tp_smapi. I don't have it. Apparently, as an ubuntu/debian binary, it's 
only provided by
deb http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/debian/ ./
deb-src http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/debian/ ./

I added this site's key with apt-key, but now apt-get update returns
Failed to fetch http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/debian/./Release  No 
MD5Sum entry in Release file 
/var/lib/apt/lists/www.oakcourt.dyndns.org_debian_._Release


This causes apt-get tp_smapi to return E: Couldn't find package tp_smapi

I looked at that file, and there is an MD5Sum entry on it. The only 
difference I can see with other Release files in that directory is that 
it has a blank line before the actual MD5Sum value.

Any ideas on:

what's happening with my extended battery?
How to fix that Release file.
Other ways of getting my extended battery to work under ubuntu?

TIA,

Jaime


-- 

******************************************************
Jaime J. Davila
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Hampshire College
School of Cognitive Science
jdavila at hampshire dot edu
http://helios.hampshire.edu/jdavila
*******************************************************