Alternatives to KDE Power Manager (Power Devil)?
 

Hi,

I'm running Kubuntu 11.10 on a new ASUS K53SV, and I'm having some issues with the KDE Power Manager.
It reports wrong values for remaining time, for whether or not the battery is charging, and to how much percent it is charged. The only thing that Power Devil always gets right is whether or not the AC adapter is plugged in.
When I remove and re-insert the AC adapter, the reported values usually change, most of them to the (probably) correct values. But not always, and mostly not all values. Also, it's not always the same values that change. I fail to see a pattern yet.

Last time, it reported that the battery was at 8%, and I had 1 hour 30 minutes remaining. After I unplugged the adapter and plugged it back in, it reported 78% (probably correct, because the battery was charging for a while) and 18 minutes remaining (unlikely).

I could probably live with this, because I always know how long the cable has been plugged in and based on that estimate which values are correct... What concerns me much more is that if there is such a mess in the reported values, how well can this work internally, when interacting with the battery? And how long will it take until the battery is gone...
I had a battery problem in Linux with my old laptop already (ASUS F5R), that's why I can't ignore this. Before I installed Linux for the first time on it (I never used anything else then KDE, so Power Devil), that 1 year old battery discharged after about 1 hour 20 minutes. Two weeks after I installed Linux, it dropped to less than 20 minutes. It was a dual boot, and the battery was just as bad in Windows after that – sort of like it was fried. I thought it was a coincidence, but same thing happened to my sister's notebook – a few months old battery, lasted 2 hours initially, only 1 hour after Linux was running there for about 2 weeks. I found similar cases via google. A friend of mine suggested the cause might be that the power manager installed just keeps charging even if the battery is full, or misbehaves in some other way....

Hence my question:
Can anyone recommend a better power manager?
Or explain to me what I did wrong with the old laptop? I didn't touch the power settings... I really don't want to lose my battery on this new one in a few weeks...

I tried to install gnome-power-manager, but there was no icon in the systray, no way to configure it or open it (gnome-power-manager was not a recognized command, “gnome” or “power” didn't find anything useful in the K menu). So I installed indicator-power (described in Synaptic as “This indicator displays current power management information and gives the user a way to access power management preferences.”), but that package took the whole Unity after it. I thought – how bad can it be, sure there will be an option to choose the desktop environment at boot, and maybe I'll have an option in KDE to configure gnome-power-manager now... Wrong... Well, it took me a while, but I got rid of Unity after all. Thank God for lynx...

How does one actually use the Gnome power manager in KDE? (Googled it, didn't help.) Or what other power manager would you recommend? And how do I disable Power Devil then? There is no package with that name in Synaptic, and I didn't find a way to disable it in System Settings. Or what can I do to make Power Devil work properly?

Sorry for the long post, I just tried to explain what solutions would be acceptable, and what I tried already...

Thanks for any help:-)

On my Kubuntu 11.10 system it looks like powerdevil is provided by package kde-workspace-bin (and kde-workspace-data). So I don't think you will be able to uninstall it without ripping out other important stuff.

Have you been able to install a gnome-based distro and see that the battery stats are reported correctly? From your post I think you haven't ... and from my understanding I'm not sure that you will see a difference. It may be a lower level thing, like the upower package, or configuration files, or even kernel support for your hardware.

I haven't heard of cases of a Linux distro causing that kind of "damage" to battery life, although it's possible. The power consumption issues with some recent 3.0 kernels could be related.

Thanks for your fast reply, SecretCode, and sorry for taking so long, I just couldn't bring myself to boot into Ubuntu (Gnome themes, especially the older ones, remind me of Windows ME too much, the OS of my childhood that still gives me nightmares... I know Gnome has changed a lot, but the feeling remains).

Anyway, the problem is the same in Gnome, so this might really be a lower level issue... It may be even worse in Gnome - not only does the remaining time continually go down, even when the AC adapter is plugged in (this happens in KDE too, then it just changes it's mind after half an hour and works properly again), the remaining time also jumps up and down several hours, to values way better than the manufacturer specified, based on random actions like me closing the System Settings window...

BUT: I've had this notebook for several weeks now, and the battery still isn't broken, that's what matters. I can probably live with the confusing remaining time values...