powersaved vs acpid
 

Hey guys and gals:)

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post, wasn't really sure. Anyways, i'm running suse 10.0 on a sony vaio laptop(pentium m 1.5ghz, 768mb ram, intel 815 chipset). Recently the power management seems to have gone cuckoo - well not completely. It's got to do with the battery power. Powersaved (with the kpowersaved frontend) doesn't report the battery power correctly anymore. It gets the charge level when the powersaved daemon is started, but doesn't report changes after that. If i restart the daemon it gets the current state, and leaves it at that from then on. Detecting the presence of the AC adapter is also somewhat hit-or-miss. When the daemon is started at boot time it detects the presence of the adapter regardless of whether the adapter is present or not. If the daemon is restarted later it correctly detects the AC adapter status, and reacts to changes in the state as well(plugging or unplugging the adapter). It was working a couple of months ago, but i'm not sure when exactly it got broken and if it was caused by an update of something, i just wasn't watching. I've done some research on the net and all i found was more confusion - most places i've visited seem to say that acpid and powersaved are mutually exclusive ( i have both running at the same time). On the other hand i've also seen documentation saying that powersaved gets it's info from acpid. Note, where it was said that powersaved and acpid conflict, it was an earlier version of powersaved(as used on suse 9.1). But i couldn't find docs saying if this behavior changed with more recent versions of powersaved. I also found docs saying that acpid does not poll the battery for state, it only receives notifications? Not sure what that means, does it mean the battery reports its state to acpid or merely changes (charging/discharging, etc)?
I'd appreciate it if someone could help clear up the issue, are powersaved and acpid mutually exclusive or not? And is acpid responsible for monitoring battery charge level or does powersaved do that? Pointers to more docs would be helpful:) Thanks

did you check if HAL daemon is running? if not, try (as root)
$ rchal start

If this does not work:

and if you have the SUSE CDs or DVDs then,
Go to <ctrl><alt><f1> and type init 3
Now type
$ yast

Put your CD/DVD and reinstall the following packages:
resmgr, powersaved, hal, acpid...

Try rebooting...

If the above does not work then see website below:
Look in this website especially last few lines: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masrjb/x40.html

Thanks, it seems to work now:
hald was running, but i reinstalled the packages (using the ones on the cd) and it seems to have fixed the problem.