Jaunty Freeze and Uncommanded Shutdown

[Tom Browder]

A few days ago, after less than a week operating my newly installed
Jaunty 64-bit on my new Dell Latitude E6500 laptop (now dual boot with
Windows XP Pro), my screen froze and a few seconds later my laptop
shut down (this was after I had added a battery display--don't
remember which package).

At the time I saw no other symptoms and things went fine for several
days (I leave my laptop plugged in and on 24/7).

Yesterday I got another failure, then another later.  At the last one
I noticed the battery indicator lights were both blinking (only one
battery is installed).

This morning I have had two failures (screen freezes, both battery
status lights blink, system shuts down) and am now operating in
Windows (which has not failed).  Before switching to Windows I tried
uninstalling some "battery" packages but so far that hasn't helped.
I did search /var/log in messages and syslog.  I noticed lines about
"battery-status-check failure" several times.

It looks to me as if the system thinks it's on battery power, the
batteries show almost discharged, and the system does an emergency
shutdown.

Questions:

1.  Any way to tell when packages were installed?

2.  Any similar problems?  (I did see a couple of similar threads but
nothing about a hard shutdown.)

3.  Any suggestions?

Notes:

1.  I just found out about the power and apci debugging info on the
wiki which I will try after I get back to Ubuntu.

2.  I read the msg about services info
(http://www.cpp-software.net/software/glass/glass_documentation.html)
and may try shutting down  acpi-support and acpid.

Thanks,

-Tom

Tom Browder
Niceville, Florida
USA