Comment 17 for bug 144830

This bug is partially fixed in karamic.

This is, now gnome power manager does recognize the disappearance/reappearance of the battery
However if you boot without battery, gnome power manager will 'think' you don't have one even if you add one.
You have to login/logout to work around this.

I had long talk with kernel developers, and we discovered that patches I did mention don't work correctly.
Besides there is strong opinion that current behavior is correct.

To fix rest of this problem, I was told that the developer will write new interface to indicate that system has a battery 'bay'
When this is done, g-p-m can use that to show battery settings instead of fact that battery is present.