Hey everyone!

I have installed CentOS 5.2 with a kernel ver. 2.6.27.4 on my Dell Studio laptop. This is the problem: when I activate the battery monitor icon from

System -> Preferences -> More Preferences -> Power Management

it seems that the system does not recognize that there is a battery present. When I check the "Always display icon" checkbox, I always get the info (and icon) that the computer is running on AC power, wheather I am running on battery or on AC power.
I looked up in the Device Manager and no battery or AC adapter are listed.
I tried installing xfce4 package with a battery plugin, but it didn't help.

Thanks to all in advance!

Are you using ACPI?

Yes, at least I think so, since the ACPID is running on all runlevels and I can read
the battery status using:

cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state .

I tried installing a python-based applet called battery-status-0.1; the installation went fine
(no error reported), when I want to add the applet to my panel the applets icon is in deed in
the applet list but when I click the "Add" button nothing happens. The other applets work fine.

Can you post the output of the following?

Unfortunately, the output is

The only commands available are acpid and acpi_listen.

I have enabled acpi in my grub.conf file so now it looks like this:

but the result of 'acpi -v' is the same.

Have you checked settings in bios?

Is HAL running? Some battery monitors use that instead of going direct to ACPI.

@EDDY1
Yes, I checked the settings in BIOS, but there is no ACPI option.

@elliott768
HAL and haldaemon are running. When I start the hal-device-manager it shows a list of all devices but there is no battery on that list.
I think that my system uses HAL instead of acpi. Still, I don't know what to do to make HAL "see" the battery.

Problem solved. I turned out that the kernel wasn't configured right, so after enabling a few options in menuconfig and re-building the kernel the battery monitor works fine.