====== Laptop Power Management - Battery ======

===== Compaq Armada E500 running Slackware 10.1 and KDE =====

I was wondering how my battery was doing. I didn't want to boot into Windows to find out.  How to do this in Linux on the above stated equipment/OS/Desktop?

  * KDE Menu/Control Center/Power Control/Laptop Battery.  If you see you see some graphics there that look like batteries and a Current Battery Status, you will be able to tell how your battery is doing.  You can put a check by "Show Battery Monitor" to dock it in the Panel.
  * If you see "Your computer doesn't have the Linux APM..." you might find that the solution is as simple as it was for me: as root do 'modprobe apm' and that loads it.  After that the Battery Monitor works nicely and shows me that my laptop is now charging.
  * Make it permanent by editing /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and uncomment the line for APM: '/sbin/modprobe apm' Then it will load when the system boots. 
  * Slackware's files are set up a bit differently than other Linux distros, but the idea should be basically the same. 

==== Same Machine with Debian Sid and Kernel 2.6.12 ====

Introduction: I had the Battery Monitor working on Debian Sarge with 2.4 kernel.  I used apm and found that I needed to also install lm-sensors and i2c.  These could be found at the Debian repositories and I chose the ones with the same suffix as my kernel.  

So, I upgraded to Debian unstable (Sid) and then got the 2.6.12 kernel.  I noticed immediately that the battery monitor no longer worked.  I'll spare you the details of how I found the solution.  First thing to know is that lm-sensors and i2c are now kernel modules.  I looked for the modules with the suffix 2.6.12 and could not find them.  At http://www.lm-sensors.nu in FAQ 3.3 I found that I should run:

<code> #sensors-detect </code>

This did a series of probes and came up with the modules I needed to be loaded. It then offered to write them for me into /etc/modules.  

Part two was to load the apm module. For some reason that wasn't loading even though I'm running apmd.  I found out it wasn't running when I installed another program and got the message that apm was not loaded.  My theory is that apmd failed to load the module, because the lm-sensors and i2c modules were not loaded.  At any rate 'apm' was appended at the bottom of /etc/modules and when that module was loaded, the battery monitor went from an empty thing saying 0% to a nice green thing showing a full charge like it was.

For the curious, the two modules that sensors-detect showed that I needed were: eeprom and i2c-piix4

 --- //[[members:Anita Lewis:start|Anita Lewis]] 2005/09/06 00:30//