Laptop mode on Hardy

[Paul Johnson]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 9:53 PM, Eddie b <lazered at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I am having a problem with Travelmate laptop shutting down on critical
> battery, it simply doesn't nor does it give me indication, ie: the
> hover-over and clicking on values are never equal (out  from each other
> varying from 20 to 35%), the only time they match is when the battery hits
> 0%. I have enabled laptop tools, it indicated when it is on battery, but the
> times never change they remain 99% untill it hits 0%, the click-on value
> often sits at 64%, this is on a fully charged battery, I know I get 2.5
> hours out of this batery, and the only indication I get its poor is when the
> laptops internal criticalbatt amber light flashes.
>
> Now I can live with this to a point, but what I can't live with is it just
> dying because the batery can't supply any more power, this as you know is
> not good for any filesystem.
>
> I have read many suggestions from google, percentages and settings are
> correct from what I can tell in acpi-support and lapt-top tools, but i've
> even read that ubuntu " strips the guts out of the debian laptop tools and
> doesnt honour many of its settings" to quote a post off one of the myriad
> pages of results recommending installing the debian version. I have followed
> other suggestions involving gconf-editor, unchecking 1 and 2 of the
> settings, but also to no avail.
>
> Has anyone running one of these thing with Hardy actually managed to get it
> to work?  Either to shut-off safely, or at least report the correct
> percentage and/or time remaining, preferably all threee but I wont push my
> luck.
>

I hope I'm not insulting your intelligence.

You don't mention how you are monitoring and controlling power.  In
the past, I have messed with acpi scripts, but it is not needed now.
In 8.04, I've been happy with the gnome-power-manager framework.  If
you are running gnome, you can install that and then run the applet.
If you right click on that, you can open preferences and it will let
you specify a shutdown at low power.

I think/hope that the detailed user revision of acpi scripts is a
thing of the past.


pj
-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas