cannot get laptop battery monitor to work!

Posts: 27
griennehornette
Joined: 20 May 2010
#1
OK, I have tried many, many things to try to get the battery monitor working for my old Dell Latitude PII. I have installed all the packages mentioned in various posts on this forum (acpi, acpi-tools, a bunch of grkrellm stuff, libntlmo, and more).

I have four battery bars in conky right now, to see if Bat0, Bat1, Cmb0 and Cmb1. All of them remain non-functional.

acpi -b in the command line gives me a message something along the lines of power source can't be found. Sorry, I should have the exact message, but I'm not at home to look right now.

This thread has been quite relevant:
battery-display-t1836.html?hilit=gkrellm%20battery

I have tried the various suggestions for conky configuration, and nada.

Here's my question: do APM and ACPI ever conflict? I have learned that APM is older. So is my laptop. Maybe my laptop would be happier with APM? If so, how do I set it up to use APM, as I read somewhere that ACPI tends to replace it. If I got rid of ACPI, what would the consequences be? I gather that it's fairly important.

Apologies for my newbie ignorance. I really don't get what APM and ACPI do. But if anyone can enlighten me, I would be most appreciative!

Thank you in advance,
griennehornette
Posts: 516
oldhoghead
Site Admin
Joined: 01 Oct 2007
#2
griennehornette ,

Don't know if you got this resolved yet, but here is my conky, my battery % works, but no dice on showing whether the ac is plugged in so I removed that part (acpiadapter

Code: Select all

TEXT
${color}antiX-M8.5-icewm
${color}$sysname $kernel
${color}Uptime: $uptime
${color}${time %a %d %b %k:%M}

${color}Monitors:
${color}cpu: ${color}${cpu}%
${color}ram : ${color}$mem${color}/${color}$memmax ${color}- ${color}$memperc%
${color}swap: ${color}$swap${color}/${color}$swapmax ${color}- ${color}$swapperc%
${color}processes: ${color}$processes  ${color}running: ${color}$running_processes
${color}battery: ${color}${battery_percent BAT0}% 
${color}Space:
${color}Root:${color} ${fs_free /} ${color}= ${fs_free_perc /}%
${color}Temp:${color} ${acpitemp}
could you post your conkyrc

cheers,
oldhoghead
Posts: 4,164
rokytnji
Joined: 20 Feb 2009
#3
Even though this thread is as ancient as the bios on the ops lappy. I have found with pre 1999 bioses that

Code: Select all

acpi=force
needs to be added to the end of kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst also to get battery sensors to work in linux. Not distro specific either. Applies to my Puppy installs also.