Hey all,
I inherited this
vpr matrix 170B laptop at work which I successfully installed Sarge on. Most everything works great and I reduced my boot time from the 10 minutes XP took (no joke, some windows monitoring programs work requires really brought this machine to a screeching halt) to less than 1 minute. I love linux! Anyway, I digress...
The Sarge
2.6.8-3-686 kernel loads the battery module for ACPI, but when I look in /proc/acpi/battery, the directory is empty and there seems to be no battery reading at all.
Okay, so I thought I'd drop a Knoppix 4.0.2 CD in and see if the battery monitoring works on a newer kernel,
2.6.12. Well, this time, it loads the battery module, but the reading is always 0% charged.
Is this just a poor ACPI implementation by the vendor? I'm in the process of a kernel recompile using the newest from kernel.org (
2.6.16.19, I believe) and was looking for some other opinions in the event it fails.
Earlier, I tried apt-pinning to Sid and just installing a newer kernel with apt-get, but it insisted on upgrading a lot of my system. Just for personal preference, I like to keep Sarge. I also tried pinning to the Backports repo, but it wanted to uninstall a bunch of things, including grub and X.
Should I just bite the bullet and upgrade to Etch or Sid? Also, with this kernel recompile I'm doing, I read that when using Sarge, the kernel compile will use newer libraries in /usr/src/linux/include. If I have to compile anything to run on this kernel, do I have to
gcc -I/usr/src/linux/include?
PS. I read some other install stuff for VPR matrix machines at Tuxmobile and linux-on-laptops but they're related to patching a 2.4 kernel for ACPI (which seems to work).
