How to check battery charge?

dtrance · n00b Joined: 21 May 2003 Posts: 10

I have an inspiron 8200 with two batteries. What utilities could I use in black to check how much juice my batteries have left? What options should I enable in my kernel?

pantherace · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Mar 2003 Posts: 79

There are two power management tools: apm and acpi. apm is the less advanced of the two and generally pretty well supported. acpi is also supported, and has more information.
My laptop (an Armada 1700 (p2)) has power features via either, but they are not enough to do much with.
acpi can be controlled through /proc and apm via the command apm (which if run will show the estimated battery life, and percent remaining in the battery (I believe it will show a second value if you have 2 batteries))

My ACPI info might be out of date, because I haven't messed with it for a while. 2.6 should have much better support.

mogorman · n00b Joined: 15 Sep 2002 Posts: 46

you need to have apm configured in your kernel, i hat modules so i always compile it into the kernel, and then you need a program to check the status, I use xbattbar, small, easy, and configurable. I dont know how it treats two batteries, I would assume it treats it as one large power source, hope this helps.

Matt

dtrance · n00b Joined: 21 May 2003 Posts: 10

No APM support in kernel ....when I try to run apm.

<*> Advanced Power Management BIOS support x x
x x [*] Ignore USER SUSPEND x x
x x [*] Enable PM at boot time x x
x x [*] Make CPU Idle calls when idle x x
x x [*] Enable console blanking using APM x x
x x [*] RTC stores time in GMT x x
x x [*] Allow interrupts during APM BIOS calls x x
x x [*] Use real mode APM BIOS call to power of

Am i missing anything else?