Jaunty Freeze and Uncommanded Shutdown

[Shannon McMackin]

Tom Browder wrote:
> 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
> 
In /var/log/apt, there's a set of logs that track the installation of 
updates and packages.  Not sure how far back they maintain info, but it 
should give you recent transactions...