gnome-power-manager does not detect battery discharging

[Chow Loong Jin]

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

In Karmic, gnome-power-manager does not detect the current charge of the battery while it is discharging. To summarize:
1. Disconnect power cord:
2. Note that gpm's tray icon detects that the power cord's disconnected, and says 99% battery
3. Wait a while
4. Note that the battery charge monitor applet shows the charge dropping, while the tooltip of gnome-power-manager shows the battery still full.
5. Plug the cord back in.
6. Note that gpm's tray icon detects that the power cord is plugged back in, and suddenly knows the correct charge.

To be make things even clearer, I shall attach a screenshot of the power graph, with data points enabled. Basically, the charge level of the battery is only detected when the power cord is disconnected, when it's connected, and when it's charging, but not when it's discharging. This is dangerous as the user will not be warned when the power hits critical level (because gpm thinks it's still 99%), and the system will not auto-hibernate despite being configured to do so, resulting in "sudden death" of the computer with the battery completely exhausted.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu May 28 18:03:49 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: gnome-power-manager 2.26.1-0ubuntu4
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_SG.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-power-manager
Uname: Linux 2.6.30-020630rc7-generic x86_64
UnreportableReason: This is not a genuine Ubuntu package

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

I'd like to add that -0ubuntu4 does not exist at the moment, but is actually -0ubuntu3 with the applied debdiff from Bug #381187. The only thing different is the notify-osd patch. I can confirm that this behaviour happens even with -0ubuntu3.

[Scott Howard (showard314)]

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 to the report? You might also want to take a look at the debugging instructions located at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingGNOMEPowerManager and submit any other logs related to your problem. Also, have you seen this in the latest package (2.27.2-oubuntu2 with DeviceKit daemon 009)? Thanks in advance.

It appears that devkit power isn't playing nice with your battery:
battery
    present: yes
    rechargeable: yes
    state: unknown
    energy: 57.5424 Wh
    energy-empty: 0 Wh
    energy-full: 57.5424 Wh
    energy-full-design: 0 Wh
    energy-rate: 0 W
    voltage: 0 V
    time to full: 0 seconds
    time to empty: 0 seconds
    percentage: 100%
    capacity: 100%
    technology: lithium-ion
  History (charge):
    1243503686 0.000 unknown
  History (rate):
    1243503686 0.000 unknown

see energy-full-design, energy rate, voltage, and history above.

Hopefully the new versions of GPM (from 2.26.1 -> 2.27.2 and DevKit 007 -> 009) helps this.

[Stefan Bader (smb)]

Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: gnome-power-manager 2.28.0-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.36bug435958v1-generic
Tags: ubuntu-unr
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-11-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[Stefan Bader (smb)]

Hopefully not only similar symptoms but different problem. I get updated values for some time, but then devicekit-power-daemon stops reading from the battery status files (verified with strace). It will get acpi events when going from ac to dc and back. But the actual charge will only be updated at that time. Directly reading from the acpi sysfs or proc interface returns current values.

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

I haven't seen this bug in a long time. I guess it's either a transient issue or fixed.

[cherep (acherep)]

This bug affects me. When the battery is discharging the Indicator Applet 0.4.5 shows that it is charging.
I'm running Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-22-generic. Should I attach any data which will help? How?

[cherep (acherep)]

FYI
Ubuntu 10.10 64bit