HAL battery status, and thus Gnome and KDE battery monitor broken in edgy

[Andrew Paulin]

Binary package hint: hal

In Edgy, the power meter does not report the battery life correctly at all, in either gnome or kde. It will show plugged/charging and approximate battery (100/50/33/0), but not exact life, nor accurate time. If I type acpi in a console, it reports accurate battery life. My laptop is an Acer Aspire 3003LCi (moblie sempron 754)

[Riccardo Setti (giskard)]

hello Andrew,

Yes, the g-p-m applet icon is able to display only significant status.

as you said:
..It will show plugged/charging and approximate battery (100/50/33/0)..

if you point your mouse over the gpm applet icon you should be able to see the right amount of time you have of battery life.

if `acpi` results will different from the g-p-m results, this is an HAL bug.

[Andrew Paulin (trash-eighty)]

When I hover over the icon, it still only shows the approximate status. The only place I can get an accurate status is acpi

[beytu (beytu)]

Hi,
I have a similar problem on Edgy too. Currently the applet is showing 0% but with the acpi command i have 5%

I didn't notice the 33% step but when a take a look on it time to time, i have either 100%, 50% or 0%.
Pointing to mouse on it report me also the same value.

When i was on Dapper, this applet was pretty good but it seems to be useless in Edgy for me :(

My laptop : Acer Extensa 4102 wmli (similar to 169x series if i remember)

[Andrew Paulin (trash-eighty)]

Just found some more info on this bug...
I ran acpi, and got this output:
andrew@IsaeliaOne:~$ acpi
     Battery 1: discharging, 91%, 00:33:08 remaining
andrew@IsaeliaOne:~$ hal-device | grep battery
  battery.remaining_time = 1800 (0x708) (int)
  battery.charge_level.percentage = 100 (0x64) (int)
  battery.charge_level.rate = 2 (0x2) (int)
  battery.charge_level.last_full = 1 (0x1) (int)
  battery.charge_level.current = 1 (0x1) (int)
  battery.voltage.current = 1 (0x1) (int)
  battery.reporting.rate = 2300 (0x8fc) (int)
  battery.reporting.current = 1128 (0x468) (int)
  battery.charge_level.capacity_state = 'ok' (string)
  battery.rechargeable.is_discharging = true (bool)
  battery.rechargeable.is_charging = false (bool)
  battery.is_rechargeable = true (bool)
  battery.charge_level.unit = 'mWh' (string)
  battery.charge_level.granularity_2 = 473 (0x1d9) (int)
  battery.charge_level.granularity_1 = 473 (0x1d9) (int)
  battery.charge_level.low = 740 (0x2e4) (int)
  battery.charge_level.warning = 2960 (0xb90) (int)
  battery.charge_level.design = 29600 (0x73a0) (int)
  battery.voltage.design = 14800 (0x39d0) (int)
  battery.voltage.unit = 'mV' (string)
  battery.reporting.granularity_2 = 32 (0x20) (int)
  battery.reporting.granularity_1 = 32 (0x20) (int)
  battery.reporting.low = 50 (0x32) (int)
  battery.reporting.warning = 200 (0xc8) (int)
  battery.reporting.design = 2000 (0x7d0) (int)
  battery.reporting.last_full = 1273 (0x4f9) (int)
  battery.reporting.unit = 'mAh' (string)
  battery.technology = 'LION' (string)
  battery.serial = '50638' (string)
  battery.model = '12ZL' (string)
  battery.vendor = 'SONY' (string)
  battery.present = true (bool)
  info.capabilities = { 'battery' } (string list)
  info.category = 'battery' (string)
  battery.type = 'primary' (string)
  linux.acpi_path = '/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1' (string)

Note the second line of the output of hal-device | grep battery. It lists the power level as 100, while acpi does not. I see similar output in the KDE and GNOME power-monitors in the tray to hal-device | grep battey. Thus, the bug is HAL, not gnome-power-manager.

Note to self: buy an asbestos laptop case :)

[Holger Bauer (umarmung-planet)]

Is this bug related / a dupe of #63652 ?