Laptop Battery Doesn't Charge Completely in openSUSE.

ccarrow14 · February 20, 2011, 8:52pm

Hello.

After switching back to openSUSE (GNOME) from Fedora, my laptop battery is only charging to about 70%. In Fedora (and Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and even Puppy which have been used before on this laptop) it charged fully.

Now, what’s kind of confusing to me is that even if I have my laptop off for charging, it still shows only around 70%. So perhaps it is only detecting 70% of my battery, even though the capacity under power statistics is 97.8%?

Also, my battery runs out faster in openSUSE, although I really don’t mind, as battery life can sometime be a hit-or-miss with Linux.

Anyways, my main question is: Are there any possible ways to make my battery work properly? I understand that it may be a hardware problem, but I’m still thinking it might be a bug, as it happened right as I switched to openSUSE.

Thank you, Cameron. If you need hardware info, just tell me what you need and I’ll post it here.

consused · February 20, 2011, 8:57pm

What release of openSUSE?

ccarrow14 · February 20, 2011, 9:01pm

I have openSUSE 11.3.

consused · February 20, 2011, 9:13pm

My battery seems to give accurate results, although sometimes it says fully charged at 100% and others 98%, but that’s close. If anything Gnome is better than KDE for power management generally on 11.3.

What does it report when you use the command in a terminal (normal user): acpi -V

ccarrow14 · February 20, 2011, 9:23pm

Battery 1: charging, 17%, charging at zero rate - will never fully charge.
Thermal 1: ok, 58.0 degrees C
AC Adapter 1: on-line

For some reason, I really do not like the sound of that.

EDIT:
Battery 1: charging, 21%, charging at zero rate - will never fully charge.
Thermal 1: ok, 54.0 degrees C
AC Adapter 1: on-line

After a second run, my laptop battery is charging, but that message still scares me.

john_hudson · February 20, 2011, 9:49pm

I would suspect the problem is battery/switching related rather than openSUSE related. I had battery problems on my dual book machine but both Windows and openSUSE reported the same.

consused · February 20, 2011, 10:07pm

Never seen that message here, it could be genuine. I would stick with Gnome for testing this. There are known problems with 11.3 KDE and incorrect reporting on switching between battery power and AC power. KDE is transitioning from HAL (deprecated), whereas Gnome on 11.3 is HAL free I believe.

ah7013 · February 20, 2011, 10:16pm

Yes that is correct. openSUSE 11.4 KDE RC1 has no HAL - they got rid of it back in M6

consused · February 20, 2011, 10:27pm

I knew that bit, and the command acpi -V doesn’t work on 11.4 RC1

As you can see it has been useful. Try that on yours?

ah7013 · February 20, 2011, 10:33pm

I had to install the acpi package but it seems to be working:


linux-0239:~ # acpi -V
Battery 0: Full, 100%
Battery 0: design capacity 414 mAh, last full capacity 355 mAh = 85%
...


linux-0239:~ # cat /etc/SuSE-release
openSUSE 11.4 RC 1 (x86_64)
VERSION = 11.4
CODENAME = Celadon

consused · February 20, 2011, 10:42pm

Thank you Andrew. At the time I was testing it and thinking it was that, quickly looked for acpi package while in Yast but must have been sleeping or obsessed with testing PulseAudio (new KDE default).

consused · February 20, 2011, 11:17pm

BTW there is now more info in the output. Here is mine from 11.4 RC1:

 acpi -V
Battery 0: Full, 100%
Battery 0: design capacity 3808 mAh, last full capacity 3694 mAh = 97%
Adapter 0: on-line
Thermal 0: ok, 45.0 degrees C
Thermal 0: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 105.0 degrees C
Thermal 0: trip point 1 switches to mode passive at temperature 95.0 degrees C
Cooling 0: LCD 5 of 15
Cooling 1: Processor 0 of 10
Cooling 2: Processor 0 of 10

Battery design capacity, Thermal trip points, and Cooling are all new. Given it’s not water-cooled, it must mean the Fan!

ccarrow14 · February 21, 2011, 7:20am

Is my acpi our of date or something? lol your guy’s reports looks so much more detailed.

I don’t know what the problem is with my battery, but I’ll try and order another one from Acer if I can just in case.

ah7013 · February 21, 2011, 10:33am

Our reports come from 11.4 RC1 and I think it has more details in 11.4 so that could be why.

ah7013 · February 21, 2011, 10:36am

No problem consused

consused · February 21, 2011, 3:07pm

Sorry about that but we drifted off-topic slightly. 11.4 is due to be released in March.

Check your laptop is being correctly detected by openSUSE. For example, you can browse the report from running (as root) this terminal command:

lspci -nnk

If you need battery mobility, it can only be good to have a spare.