I have a Dell Latitude D830 with two batteries.
Running openSUSE 12.2rc2 “GM”, 64-bit. KDE desktop.
One of them is the primary battery (“Battery 0”) and the other (“Battery 1”) slides into the module bay (where the CD drive use to be).
But openSUSE wants to drain the Battery 1 first which should actually be drained second as it is intended for backup/extended life.
So I guess I’m wondering how to control which battery openSUSE tries to use/discharge first, or is it possible for them to both be discharged/used at the same time?
I read more about this ubuntu bug where the secondary battery is drained to critical level and the computer shuts off (or suspends) depending on the power manager settings.
It shouldn’t do that when there is another battery available that is fully charged.
I am running my system now to see what happens when this secondary battery reaches critical level; will it switch to the other battery, or suspend the system?
In comment #5 of that Ubuntu bug (now closed) it says to modify the acpi code and switch the hardware IDs for bat0/bat1 and that should reverse the order in which they are drained.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/294021/comments/5
I just don’t know where to modify this… But ideally, I would like for both batteries to be discharged simultaneously instead of one after the other.
When the secondary battery discharged to 0%, the system switched to draining the primary battery. Perfect!
But now, how to change the discharge order or get them both discharging together? Where are those magical acpi files…
Others are bound to know far more than I do about this (and I only have a single battery anyway), but to start with what is revealed by
acpi -b
I note that ‘acpi -v’ gives
Report bugs to Michael Meskes <meskes@debian.org>
So, if you think it’s not behaving as it needs to, I think you should attract the developer attention it may require to correct it.
Thanks deano. That’s a neat utility. Had to install it because it wasn’t there by default.
It seems to just read the results from /sys/ and /proc/ and that alone has given me insight after exploring those folders quite a bit. But I never found a file that could let me change the mapping of the hardware IDs to the Battery numbers.
Going to keep reading about batteries and stuff. I might boot into Win7 tomorrow to see what she does.
I didn’t get much sleep last night, so head not thinking clearly today. openSUSE doesn’t use on the acpid power management daemon any more. Instead, upower is used, consisting of the upowerd daemon, some supporting libraries, and various CLI tools.
You can read about it here
UPower
The man pages are also your friends:
man upower
On 2012-09-01 00:36, saultdon wrote:
> But now, how to change the discharge order or get them both discharging
> together? Where are those magical acpi files…
Simultaneous discharge? I think that is not doable. You might switch from one to the other
alternatively on short intervals, though.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
I’d like to try that. But I don’t know how.
I downloaded the yast2-powermanager thingy and that only lets me change power profiles.
Do you know where I can at least switch the battery IDs so that I can reverse the discharge order?
On 2012-09-03 01:26, saultdon wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2483144 Wrote:
>> You might switch from one to the other
>> alternatively on short intervals, though.
> I’d like to try that. But I don’t know how.
Me neither, I don’t own that kind of hardware.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
This might be a function of the laptop hardware, so I’m not sure if this can be controlled from the OS as such.
Thanks for the input so far. I’d still like to be able to change which battery drains first. Still going to keep reading 