[AuckLUG] Reported Battery Life

[Karl.]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 03:31:58PM +1200, John Deverall wrote:
> 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 really don't know what I'm talking about here, but my understanding is 
that the APM and ACPI modules in the kernel are interfaces to the APM or 
ACPI stuff in the bios/hardware of the machine, hence you need to use 
the right one for whatever gubbins (my spellchecker complains about that 
word, for some reason) you have in your machine.

I believe that ACPI is the newer replacement of APM.  I have some 
splendid old PII-400 machines (one of which is my main machine at home) 
- being a little on the old side, they only support APM, which I have
working moderately well with a 2.6.21 kernel.  (my point being that APM 
is old, but is still available for fairly new kernels)

My experience of APM/ACPI is that there is a lot of guessing out on the 
web - difficult to find solid information on what to do, but there's 
plenty of "I don't know how it works, but do this...".  That may just 
have been poor searching on my part.

What distro are you using?

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