[toolmad]

Hi again Oscar,

Everything you said was 100% spot on! Thank you.

I had not noticed the Grub options for booting into the other (mistakenly installed) kernel versions because I have a multiboot system. But when I checked /boot/grub/menu.lst in OpenSuse, sure enough, the debug, xen and trace kernels were listed too.

So I used Yast Software Manager to remove the unwanted tp_smapi kernel versions and then removed the unwanted kernel versions.

command
# lsmod|egrep 'hdaps|thinkpad_ec|tp_smapi'
resulted in showing that none of the modules were loaded.

command
# modprobe tp_smapi
resulted in error
"thinkpad_ec: cannot claim io ports 0x1600-0x161f"
(as detailed in the tp_smapi wiki due to T400 & T500 machines needing FORCE_IO=1).

after a bit more reading of the wiki and other pages (and some lucky guesswork) I added line "options thinkpad_ec force_io=1" (without the quotes) to file modprobe.conf.local in directory /etc

command
# modprobe tp_smapi
now resulted in no errors

and command
# lsmod|egrep 'hdaps|thinkpad_ec|tp_smapi'
displayed the following:
tp_smapi 26832 0
thinkpad_ec 7664 1 tp_smapi

and sure enough ....the smapi directory appeared in sys/devices/platform

so thanks to you I've managed to make substantial progress.

my next step is to figure out how to have the tp_smapi loaded automatically at bootup, and then edit the start/stop battery charge %ages.

Many thanks for your help. I would not have gotten this far without your help.

Mark