Comment 61 for bug 403303

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).