[EN][SuSE 11.3][KDE 4.4.4 rel 3][Battery issue] HP 6720s

English Hardware
1

Greetings !!

I really don’t know if this is an hardward issue but since last friday I got the plug-in Battery Monitor that shows randomly a big red cross on the icon indicating that there is no battery present.

Problem is that if I use acpi -b command I got a message such this one:

Battery 1: discharging, 45%, 01:01:48 remaining

This is the only way to obtain informations of the current state of charge.
Note that when power supply connected the command acpi -a indicates that the ac adapter is on and the remained time to have the battery fully charged.

As all the indications concerning the hardware are correct (no sudden shutdown once the ac plug disconnected, the led blinking when battery very low, etc…) I have no reasons to be worried about the hardware BUT I need the battery to be “recognized” as I use VMware (which the support let me down like a was a dumb) and I know, to have repeated three times, when miraculously the battery was recognized: if the battery is considered as “not present” VMware won’t open !!

The /proc/acpi/battery/C23B/info indicates that the battery is present, same informations from state all indications I have are contradicting those received by the widget.

Why I put this post in hardware ?

Because, sometimes, when I boot the system, the widget indicates that the battery is present… but it is random, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t… that is frustrating. I’m supposed to show things to my students using vmware and I’m can not count on my laptop to do my classes…

I tried to check for parameters to force this widget to look at the right place to set the state of the battery but I never found any file to help me doing that.

I tried to uninstall/install the widget from the system tray, independently (from the panel’s configuration feature) but nothing worked better.

Something I’m sure is that Vmware will work ONLY when the Battery Monitor indicates the presence of the Battery (even if the AC Adapter is plugged).

I’ll post something similar in the kde forum.

Sebastian we will have a talk ^^

Thank you for your patience and apologizes for my poor English.

Soundlord

2

Using livecd the Battery Monitor widget is working ok.
So it is definetly OS related, I now wonder how make things to make hal/dbus work better, because this is clearly related to those protocols.

I’ll dig deeper.

3

If you are using KDE4 on 11.3, there are previous posts (don’t remember the threads) reporting problems with KDE power management. This affects the reported status on switching between AC and battery power not being updated. IIRC correctly 11.3 Gnome power management doesn’t have the same problem. But be aware that Gnome on 11.3 doesn’t use HAL, but KDE is still dependent on it. I believe HAL should be completely gone for openSUSE 11.4 release (March).

4

Thank you !!

I have a workaround not comfortable but as far as I can see it works !!

Start linux in run level 3 (inittab) and from there startx → Battery Monitor is on !!

I was believing it was wicd that caused the issue, but it wasn’t.
I’m still around to find a way to fix it up…