[AuckLUG] Reported Battery Life

[John Deverall]

Thanks Karl, 

Yes that's what I'm getting as other avenues don't exist. APM suggests
either a kernel recompile as support isn't there or turned on by
default. I may be able to do it with flags - (hopefully)

Also I don't see why APM should work when ACPI doesn't. I mean they both
have to measure the current across the battery right? Also it's not like
ACPI isn't reporting any results - why would it report crumby ones? 

I have found this on wikipedia

"A unique drawback of the Li-ion battery is that its life span is
dependent upon aging from time of manufacturing (shelf life) regardless
of whether it was charged, and not just on the number of
charge/discharge cycles. So an older battery will not last as long as a
new battery due solely to its age, unlike other batteries. This drawback
is not widely publicised.

Li-ion batteries can even go into a state that is known as deep
discharge. At this point, the battery may take a very long time to
recharge. For example, a laptop battery that normally charges fully in 3
hours may take up to 42 hours to recharge. Or the deep discharge state
may be so severe that the battery will never come back to life. Deep
discharging only takes place when products with rechargeable batteries
are left unused for extended periods of time (often 2 or more years) or
when they are recharged so often that they can no longer hold a charge.
This makes Li-ion batteries unsuitable for back-up applications compared
to lead-acid batteries, or even to nickel metal hydride batteries."

It's actually useful information for everyone actually about the care of
Lithium-ion batteries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery 

Anyway I'll try out APM and if that works I'll let people know and
scratch my head accordingly. 





-----Original Message-----
From: aucklug-bounces at linux.net.nz [mailto:aucklug-bounces at linux.net.nz]
On Behalf Of Karl.
Sent: Friday, 24 August 2007 3:13 p.m.
To: Auckland Linux User Group mailing list
Subject: Re: [AuckLUG] Reported Battery Life

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 02:59:00PM +1200, John Deverall wrote:
> Yes I took top legal advice

Now that we've covered the legal aspects, I can reveal that some 
scroogle searching (http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm) led me 
to these items of potential interest:

http://www.webservertalk.com/message212370.html
(mainly look at the posts by Vincent C Jones)

and http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dpelleg/X23_freebsd.html (but that's for 
FreeBSD)

It looks to me like APM is probably the way to go for that machine - 
quite what you do with it, I do not know.


Karl.
-- 
http://mowson.org/karl

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