[Karmic] battery is charged (when discharging) and unaccurate remaining battery time

[Jordi]

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

When I switch on my computer using only the battery, the Battery monitor on the tray is showing ALWAYS that the battery is fully charged. However, making a simple click onto the monitor icon, it shows a popup with the actual percentage of remaining battery. In this situation, if I do not verify every while and while the remaining power, the computer just runs out of battery and switch off abruptly. When restarting, I had to fscheck the filesystems.

However, I found a trick. All this changes when I simply connect the PC to the power (just less than a second) and the monitor changes:

* A popup shows that the the battery is discharging, as well as the remaining battery percentage and the time.
* The tray icon is showing that the battery is discharging.
* The popup information when click the icon remains the same.

In this situation, the battery monitor shows 2 alerts: the first one some time before running out of battery (about 9% of battery) and the second one when only 1-2% of battery remains. In both cases, the popup alert shows correctly the percentage of battery, but do not show the proper remaining time (just "unknown remaining time" or so). In contrast, in this case, the computer switch off normally (as I have set up in the settings).

All these problems appeared when upgrading to Karmic. In the previous ubuntu release, all worked really fine.

My hardware settings are as follows (sudo lshw):

    description: Notebook
    product: HP Pavilion dv3500 Notebook PC
    vendor: Hewlett-Packard
    version: F.15
    serial: CNU9286D62
    width: 32 bits
    capabilities: smbios-2.4 dmi-2.4
    configuration: boot=normal chassis=notebook uuid=801A8556-865A-86F0-8786-881C88B2893E
  *-core
       description: Motherboard
       product: 1505
       vendor: Inventec
       physical id: 0
       version: KBC Version 13.14
       serial: Base Board Serial Number
       slot: Base Board Chassis Location
     *-firmware
          description: BIOS
          vendor: Hewlett-Packard
          physical id: 0
          version: F.15 (05/04/2009)
          size: 1MiB
          capabilities: pci upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppynec int13floppytoshiba int13floppy360 int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int9keyboard int10video acpi usb
     *-cpu
          description: CPU
          product: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6400 @ 2.00GHz
          vendor: Intel Corp.
          physical id: 12
          bus info: cpu@0
          version: 6.7.10
          serial: 0001-067A-0000-0000-0000-0000
          slot: CPU
          size: 1200MHz
          capacity: 2GHz
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 800MHz
          capabilities: fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx x86-64 constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm cpufreq
          configuration: id=0
     *-pci
          description: Host bridge
          product: Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub
          vendor: Intel Corporation
          physical id: 100
          bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0
          version: 07
          width: 32 bits
          clock: 33MHz
        *-pci:0
             description: PCI bridge
             product: Mobile 4 Series Chipset PCI Express Graphics Port
             vendor: Intel Corporation
             physical id: 1
             bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0
             version: 07
             width: 32 bits
             clock: 33MHz
             capabilities: pci pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
             configuration: driver=pcieport-driver
             resources: irq:24 ioport:5000(size=4096) memory:d0000000-d2ffffff ioport:c0000000(size=268435456)
           *-display
                description: VGA compatible controller
                product: G98 [GeForce 9300M GS]
                vendor: nVidia Corporation
                physical id: 0
                bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
                version: a1
                width: 64 bits
                clock: 33MHz
                capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom
                configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
                resources: irq:16 memory:d2000000-d2ffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff(prefetchable) memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:5000(size=128)
....
  *-power UNCLAIMED
       description: OEM_Define1
       product: OEM_Define4
       vendor: OEM_Define2
       physical id: 1
       version: OEM_Define5
       serial: OEM_Define2
       capacity: 75mWh

*** lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 9.10
Release: 9.10

*** apt-cache policy gnome-power-manager
gnome-power-manager:
  Instal·lat: 2.28.1-0ubuntu1
  Candidat: 2.28.1-0ubuntu1
  Taula de versió:
 *** 2.28.1-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://cat.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

*** What do I expect?
The correct operation of the battery monitor, showing the correct remaining time and percentage of the battery, working always correctly, independently of whether the power is connected to the computer or not.

[Ryan S Kingsbury (ryanskingsbury)]

I have the same problem running 64-bit Ubuntu Karmic (2.6.31-16 kernel) on an HP dv3510nr notebook.

[IKT (ikt)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 489824, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.