I tarred up my user dir-tree and ftp'd it to another machince and re-loaded Windows ME to see if that piece of cr-- would see the battery. It did. It also saw the AC going in and out. Bummer. I'll just live without the battery with Linux.
I reloaded Mandrake 8.1. ftp'd the user account dir-tree and untarred. (I learned that the system likes a reboot after this, but everthing came up fine after that.) I pulled the AC cord with Linux running and started my stop watch. Some searching on "no system battery" on Google turned up several stories about laptops showing: APM BIOS 1.2 (kernel driver 1.14) AC on-line, no system battery 1. with AC un-plugged 2. running on battery (like I was then) Here's the best one: http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0111.0/0356.html It seems that my Compaq Presario 12XL500 might be running ACPI instead of APM in the BIOS. Check out the guilty parties at this web site: http://www.acpi.info/index.html Support for ACPI in Linux is seminal: http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/acpi/acpi_howto.txt I may have found my open-source calling - to be an ACPI guinea pig. I just heard two very quiet beeps. Could it be the remnants of APM telling me the battery is low? Stop watch is at 50 minutes. Hmmm. I plugged in the power. Still no usable information from apm -v. I am guessing that the battery is OK after all. May the restoration techniques suggested earlier are responsible. I checked that apmd was running, but it is probably ineffective since /proc/apm is not giving any useful information. <RANT>Way to go Microsoft, Phoenix, Intel, Compaq, and Toshiba. No reason to maintain backwards compatibility, eh? Who do you really think is responsible for this kind of value management?</RANT> Thanks all, Mike M. On Sunday 03 February 2002 10:46 am, you wrote: > On Monday 04 February 2002 03:55 am, M. Mueller (bhu5nji) wrote: > > Yup. Changed from Windows ME to Mandrake 8.1. > > > > Here's another funny thing. When I unplug the main power, apm -v still > > reports being on AC power. > > Here's a long shot. Does your battery have an on/off switch? I once > assembled a laptop from spare parts, and it wouldn't stay on for more than > a few minutes without AC. I finally decided to give up on researching APM > and attempt to replace the battery. I opened the case to check the part > number for the battery, and I saw a little, red 1/0 switch on the battery > itself. I assume that it's used for long-term storage. I switched the > battery on, and it's still working well today. > > This problem is unlikely given your symptoms, but I thought that I'd > mention it. > > ---Tom > _______________________________________________ > TriLUG mailing list > http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
