battery time remaining reported incorrectly

[Brian Neltner]

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

My Dell Latitude d520 has the standard primary battery, and an additional battery in the media bay. In Feisty, it gave an accurate report on time remaining. In Gutsy, while the battery percentage is reported accurately as the sum of the charge remaining over the sum of the total capacity, the time remaining is wrong. In fact, somewhat entertainingly if I look at the Power History "Estimated Time Remaining", it has a slope of taking about 20 minutes to drop by 10 minutes of estimated remaining time.

Thanks,

[Brian Neltner (neltnerb)]

Hello,

I believe I've identified the problem.

In the gnome-power-manager source code, it seems to be asking HAL what
the value of the property 'battery.remaining_time' is. However, this
value only exists if the battery is currently being discharged. My
batteries discharge asymmetrically (media bay first), so it only reports
the time remaining for the media bay battery instead of taking the raw
power usage and dividing it by the raw total capacity like it should.

I'd try to actually fix this in the code, but while I can read code
reasonably well, I don't understand the overall architecture of the
power manager and the modification is probably best left to someone more
familiar with the code. I believe the problems lie in gpm-cell.c.

Thanks,
Brian

On Sat, 2008-01-12 at 18:30 +0000, Brian Neltner wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager
>
> My Dell Latitude d520 has the standard primary battery, and an
> additional battery in the media bay. In Feisty, it gave an accurate
> report on time remaining. In Gutsy, while the battery percentage is
> reported accurately as the sum of the charge remaining over the sum of
> the total capacity, the time remaining is wrong. In fact, somewhat
> entertainingly if I look at the Power History "Estimated Time
> Remaining", it has a slope of taking about 20 minutes to drop by 10
> minutes of estimated remaining time.
>
> Thanks,
>
> ** Affects: gnome-power-manager (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Undecided
> Status: New
>

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please attach the resulting log file of: gnome-power-bugreport.sh &> gpm.log and a tarball of the /proc/acpi directory to the bug report? Thanks in advance.

[Ben (pumrum)]

I'm having this problem as well. It only reports the time remaining of 1 battery, not the sum of both batteries. I have attached the requested files from my computer as well. I'm running a Dell D820 with an 86.6wh main battery and a 46.6wh media bay battery. The main battery is about 1/2 dead, the expansion battery is brand new. Total time should be >3hrs, but at 100% on both it reports 1.5hrs.

[Ben (pumrum)]

and my gpm.log as well

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with Intrepid?, Thanks in advance.

[Brian Neltner (neltnerb)]

Hi Pedro,

No, this bug still exists in the current Hardy gnome power manager.

I have no idea what Intrepid is.

Thanks,

On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 15:56 +0000, Pedro Villavicencio wrote:
> Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
> Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been
> any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue
> for you? Can you try with Intrepid?, Thanks in advance.

[Brian Neltner (neltnerb)]

Hi Pedro,

No, this bug still exists in the current Hardy gnome power manager.

I have no idea what Intrepid is.

Thanks,

[Duane Hinnen (duanedesign)]

Intrepid is the latest release of ubuntu. If you are still experiencing this problem with Intrepid please feel free to reopen this bug.