Laptop Power Management - Battery

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.

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:

 #sensors-detect 

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

— Anita Lewis 2005/09/06 00:30