[AuckLUG] Reported Battery Life

[John Deverall]

Hi Karl, 

I'm running debian etch (stable). 

Yeah your understanding is about what mine is and my googling has
consisted of - "I don't know how it works but try this.." also although
I know my googling has been substandard and I was being lazy posting to
the list. 

I know the x23 most definitely supports APM (which is the old one for
surely) and that it is quite probable that my laptop supports both. I
think the x23 is a 2002-2003 model so when ACPI came in I'm not sure
however the fact that information comes back suggests ACPI is supported?


In the instance that my laptop didn't support ACPI I'm not sure what
would happen either. The bios certainly doesn't make any mention of ACPI
or give any clues. 

I see you're running fairly old hardware (as am I). What applications do
you choose to run? Anything special? 

John




-----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 3:47 p.m.
To: Auckland Linux User Group mailing list
Subject: Re: [AuckLUG] Reported Battery Life

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

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