slackware on a laptop
 

I just installed slackware 9.1 on an IBM thinkpad. I used the bareacpi.i kernal. Are there any tool in slackware i can use to see how much power my battery has.

If you use GNOME add the battery monitor to your panel. If you use KDE, it should automatically show in the system tray. If you use XFCE there is a panel plugin you can download and install (google for xfce-goodies). You can also try xbattery, though I'm not sure if that will work with ACPI. There is xapm, but that works with APM, not ACPI.

From a terminal look under /proc/acpi and I believe you'll find something. If you find a file node for battery (or battery0 or something like that), cat it and it should give you a report.

Make sure you uncomment "/sbin/modprobe apm" in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules

He's using the bareacpi kernel. APM and ACPI cannot be loaded simultaneously IIRC.

...He's using the bareacpi kernel. APM and ACPI cannot be loaded simultaneously IIRC....

Yes I read that incorrectly!

since you have acpi get kacpi which is a kde battery monitor but also has fan,cpu and other information beyond other things i have seen out there it works with gnome too - and with some notification area tweaking you can get it to dock in gnome if u use gnome

also think about getting a 2.6.5 or 2.6.6 kernel and setting cpu_freq - if u have an intel processor with speedstep it will allow you to set your processor speed to its max

if you just want battery monitoring in gnome - right click on the panel Add to panel --- Utilities ---battery charge monitor - will show your battery level and whether ac is on
although the apm suspend command wont work with your kernel

i'm a big fan of gkrellm.

Monitors everything and can be used in any WM.

Which model stinkpad are you using? I have slack on a 760xl, but slack 7 is the only version I've been able to get to install with X working.

A IBM thinkpad T21 PIII 800

Thanks,

I was hoping someone had figured out how to get a more uptodate version running on the older machines. Slack 7 isn't giving me any problems but I would like to run a newer version of KDE. Oh well, I guess I'll just keep plugging away untill I get a newer laptop.

dannyl,

since you asked, i thought you might like to know that i am running Slack 9.1 on an old POS Gway. it has a P233MMX processor and 192mb of RAM. i have no trouble running X, although I found both KDE and GNOME to be too memory intensive, so I use IceWM with the ROX-Filer for my gui....

The command apm in a term will give you the battery percentage and approx. time left.
That is, if apm is running...

apm -M will keep a small display open.
And then there's xapm which is a simple xwindows apm monitor.

Gkrellm is excellent, as mentioned above, as well.


--Shade

I'm running Slackware 9.0 on a 133MHz laptop with 32MB of RAM.

On the IBM 760XL the problem seems to be with X rather than the GUI. I haven't been able to get any version newer than Slack 7 to work, regardless of WM I choose. I also tried Debian and Vector Linux with no success running X even though both are supposed to run well on older machines. The problem is most likely due to the video card rather than processor or memory. (80 meg).

What graphics card/chipset does your laptop use?
I know that in the X 4.x series, they took out support for some older cards -- yours may be one of them... They were supposed to be replaced by a unified driver base included in X 4. Why don't you post up a little more hardware detail, and we'll see if we can get you going :)

Things we'll need are the native resolution of the LCD screen, Graphics Card, mobo chipset (probably), and anything else you can think of :)

lspci is your friend.

--Shade