No warning/action when battery is low
 

Hi

I have Ubuntu 7.10 installed on a Sony Viao vgn-fz21m (kernel 2.6.22-14-generic). It is running fine.

The biggest problem I have with it is that there is absolutely no action, warning or sound when the battery is low. The power-management is setup to hibernate when the battery is low, but no evail. I have also activated the acpi_cpufreq module but no difference.

Acpi set up looks ok to me:
ronald@rasmussen:~$ acpi -V
Battery 1: charging, 89%, 00:00:28 until charged
Thermal 1: ok, 44.0 degrees C
Thermal 2: ok, 44.0 degrees C
AC Adapter 1: on-line
ronald@rasmussen:~$ more /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
present: yes
design capacity: 57720 mWh
last full capacity: 57720 mWh
battery technology: non-rechargeable
design voltage: 125580 mV
design capacity warning: 1000 mWh
design capacity low: 400 mWh
capacity granularity 1: 100 mWh
capacity granularity 2: 100 mWh
model number:
serial number:
battery type: LiOn
OEM info: Sony Corp.
ronald@rasmussen:~$ more /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/alarm
alarm: unsupported
ronald@rasmussen:~$ more /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/
alarm info state
ronald@rasmussen:~$ more /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: charging
present rate: 782100 mW
remaining capacity: 51630 mWh
present voltage: unknown
ronald@rasmussen:~$

Does anybody have any hints on how to solve this?

Cheers, Ronald

There is some sony-specific stuff. I have a VGN-FS415M and I need the modules sonypi and sony_acpi.
Try lsmod | grep sony

The power saving configurations and options should work (unless you face error messages), but they depend on the kernel module(s) that actually "do the job", so if those modules aren't loaded or don't work with your hardware, the "desktop software" (like battery monitor, actions you've configured, ...) doesn't work either. Warnings might be visible in logs or dmesg if things aren't working, but I'm not sure about them..

So, try to figure out which module(s) you need to have loaded, and load them. With some hardware different modules that work on the same matter might come in each other's way, so if you're facing trouble, make sure you're not using multiple modules for one matter if you don't need them do that. I haven't paid attention to this specific matter of power saving, but shortly said I mean: if you've got a sony-specific module to do something and a generic module to do the same something, and you need the sony module and it does what the generic would do if it could, unload (and blacklist) the generic module to give way to the sony-specific module.

Hi Bouncher,

I'm pretty sure the the right modules are loaded OK because the battery monitor (both via terminal and the gui-applet) work fine and give the correct charge-%.

All that I really miss is a warning/alert/action when the battery is almost empty. I assume this action is generic and not hidden in some brand-specific driver, is it?

Cheers, ROnald