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Battery problems with Ubuntu Hardy
Well, it was all working fine with Gutsy, but since the upgrade to Hardy, the gnome-power-manager applet shows bad data. To be honest, I’d rather see no battery status at all.
It seems that the problem lies with HAL, in that it only samples battery data from ACPI when it receives an ACPI event. So I remove the AC adapter, HAL gets the event, and discovers “on battery, 100%”. But it doesn’t update until there’s another ACPI event.
This type of stuff really should “just work” by now, and I find it hard to forgive the introduction of a regression like this. Many users have reported similar problems (which are sometimes solved by installing more recent releases of HAL) but some folks - myself included - still suffer.
Yeah, I know, I should get off my lazy arse and investigate the problem. I could hack HAL scripts, tinker with ACPI and kernel config. But my Slackware days are long gone and life’s too short. Besides, the risk of “surprise battery death” makes life a little more exciting.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Jun 8th, 2008