The Battery Charge Monitor problem

neozero62 · 11-30-2003, 02:44 PM

Hello, I am having trouble getting Fedora Core 1 to run a battery monitor on my HP Invent laptop. I had Red Hat 9 on this laptop before, and the service would always fail at startup. Now it seams to start on Fedora, but when I right-click on the task bar, and add item Battery Charge Monitor, It gives me this error message: "The Battery Charge Monitor applet appears to have died unexpectedly

Reload this applet?" It dose this over and over again. Anyone know why?? Thanks for your time.
-Randy

finegan · 11-30-2003, 04:33 PM

The first step is to debug why its barfing. There are a number of kde battery toys, I think this one may be kbatt, but its real name is in that list. Open up a Konsole and try to run it from there, just type in the name of the thing at the console prompt and it should error just like last time, although this time its going to barf its fatal error to that Konsole. Then paste that in here so we can sort it out.

Cheers,

Finegan

neozero62 · 11-30-2003, 05:04 PM

I can't find the monitor tool on console, also, I am running gnome for my GUI. I have found out that apmd is not starting up correctly. When I try to start the service from gnome I get a error dialog saying "apmd failed. The error was: Starting up APM daemon: [FAILED]" I know apmd is the service that monitors the battery, so I think this may be my problem. any Ideas?

finegan · 11-30-2003, 06:34 PM

I can't find the exact name of the thing, and I admit not really being with Fedora, not having had a chance to install it, but this is what I figure:

Redhat/Fedora, whatever, finally got their act together and switched the kernel to acpi, the new power standard that pretty much every bios has had support for, for about... three or four years. Linux first supported it in the kernel at 2.4.20, Windows didn't bother really until XP, acpi is a nasty mess.

Not surprisingly, it seems that the Fedora scripts are still trying to start the apm daemon, yet you have an acpi kernel. You need to install acpid and get it in the init order. If you first uninstall apmd things will go cleaner. Use apt-get or yum, or whatever the coolio toy is and it should install and configure acpid to get started at boot. Hopefully that battery monitor will get reconfigured auto-magically to look for the /proc/acpi entries instead of the /proc/apm entry, although it might take more monkeying afterwards.

Cheers,

Finegan