Wrong battery levels (remaining_time)

[Carlos F.]

Sorry not to give more information, I needed to report this bug because it's kind of critical and I hope it's easy to solve.

I'm using gnome-power-manager since Dapper and it worked flawlessly. I upgraded to Edgy Knot 3 with the upgrade-manager, and many things broke, but all of them got solved but one. This one is the battery issue.

My laptop is an Acer Aspire 1692, and as I said before, the battery level report was correct in Dapper. Now, when I unplug the cable, g-p-m tells me that the battery level is critical (and it launches the default action to do when the battery level is critical). The thing is, the battery level isn't critical, it's just an error.

I'm not quite sure where the error comes from. G-p-m measures it incorrectly, and so does the battery panel applet. Strangely enough, running an "acpi -t" on a console reports the *actual* remaining battery time.

I'm thinking this might be a dbus issue, but I'm not sure, so I leave it as "I don't know". The bug is not critical but is a serious issue, because it can cause all laptops (after upgrading to Edgy) to shutdown or hivernate every time they are unplugged from the AC, not to mention that the user can't get the real remaining battery time

If you need more info, please contact me

[Luka Renko (lure)]

See also bug 60442 for more details about similar problems.

[Thomas Tonino (ttonino)]

It may be a kernel problem. When I unplug AC on my MSI S270-type laptop, I see the following:

ttonino@flappie:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: discharging
present rate: 65535 mA
remaining capacity: 4296 mAh
present voltage: 16717 mV

The current sensed is way too high for a moment.

Gnome reports the battery is 99% charged but only 4 minutes are left.

A workaround could be to ignore invalid discharge rates. Perhaps the faulty value is always 65535 mA, or be 10 amps as nonsense.

It seems the new gnome power manager averages the power usage; don't use the faulty values to update the running average.

[Carl Janzen (carl-janzen)]

I'm using an Acer Aspire 1640 and experience the same problems with Edgy. The remaining percentage is at 0%, and I'm currently running on battery. Initially after unplugging the power cord, the system shut down. After a reboot it continues to operate at 0% power level, sometimes reporting 1 hour remaining (while still at 0%). As indicated above, acpi -t indicates the correct information, and I also had no such problems with Dapper. After an upgrade, and subsequent clean Edgy install to remove any artifacts of the upgrade, power management is still broken.

[Carlos F. (topopardo-deactivatedaccount)]

I confirm that this is fixed in Feisty

[towsonu2003 (towsonu2003)]

thanks for letting us know :)

[Matt Weller (gapplewagen)]

Indeed. Feisty Herd 4 battery levels are fine for me now.