kernel-packages team mailing list archive

[Sitsofe Wheeler <403303@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rob Smith:
This is an old (and resolved) issue - generally speaking issues that have been fixed and haven't seen activity for years won't see helpful/friendly followups when you post to them...

> It has been explained that this is an Asus based problem

Pretty much. Whoever wrote the BIOS in the EeePC 701/900 followed the
non-rechargeable battery part of the ACPI spec even though the battery
is rechargeable (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15979#c4 ).
This is bad in all sorts of ways...

> Why can't Debian/Ubuntu see the battery correctly

They can if you use a kernel with a workaround in it (2.6.35 -stable or
later see https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15979#c50 ) - i.e.
this issue will appear fixed to you in Ubuntu 10.10 and later. If you
know how to compile your own kernels you can fix this on Ubuntu 10.04
(or earlier) by installing a 2.6.35 or later -stable kernel or
backporting the patch but don't even attempt to do this if you don't
know what you're doing! Since Ubuntu 10.04 is not supported on desktops
anymore moving to a later Ubuntu (or another recent distro) is by far
the best option.

> but Xandros Linux (and Windows XP) can

I believe Xandros's GUI battery program had been hardcoded to understand
the faulty information and correct for it but it's been years since I
last had Xandros around to boot it. For Windows XP I don't know how the
battery is read internally - perhaps the way its ACPI battery reading
was written happened to cope with this particular type of bad battery
information (and if BIOS testing only happened against Windows then no
one would know it was being done wrong until it was too late).

-- 
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/403303

Title:
  power manager reports 1% battery even though it is full on Asus Eee PC
  netbook

Status in DeviceKit based power management D-Bus backend:
  Unknown
Status in “devicekit-power” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

  after logging in, I see a dialog box that says my battery may be
  broken and that it only has 1% charge, yet it's been plugged in for a
  long time, and the battery meter shows that it's full.  Will post
  screenshot.  The netbook I'm running this on is an Eee900, and this is
  on the A3 release of karmic UNR.

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Wed Jul 22 22:08:05 2009
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
  Package: gnome-power-manager 2.27.2-0ubuntu2
  ProcEnviron:
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-3.19-generic
  SourcePackage: gnome-power-manager
  Tags:  ubuntu-unr
  Uname: Linux 2.6.31-3-generic i686

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