Battery Life for Inspiron 2650
 

I have been trying to look for a way to get my battery to show in Slack. I was looking at another thread and they said to try a program called akpi. Or could there be another type of program. I am about to recompile the kernel and I also so that I might have to add something. Anyone have any ideas on what I would have to do.

add acpi support

I did that an still nothing

I don't use slackware, but have got the battery levels to appear in Kde 3.1.4 after loads of messing about in Debian. This information may help.

When you enable ACPI support it creates an ACPI entry under /proc. The battery information can be found at:

/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1

In there you'll find a file called "state"

if you cat that file, you'll see a line:

remaining capacity: xxxxx mah

which is basically the amount of battery life left in the battery, but not in hours + minutes (as you'd probably like). What you need is a utility that then takes this and puts it on your screen ... In KDE 3.1.4, this utility is called Klaptopdaemon.

If that doesn't apply to slackware, sorry, but I thought it may be of help.

ACPI is bogus in my opinion. It never works for me either.... I have a dell too. Use APM. It's as easy as could be.

cd /usr/src/linux
make menuconfig

get into the Power Management section. Completely uncheck the "ACPI" and check APM. then scroll down in the heading and check "enable PM at boot time". I always integrate those into the kernel vs. Modules... Keep backing out until it asks you for the final save.

make clean bzImage modules modules_install

I always delete everything in /lib/modules/2.4.22 before I do that. I'm sure it's completely unnecessary. I never have 2 options in grub any way so I don't want left over modules laying around. Doing this type of minor tweaking to the kernel won't result in a non-compilable kernel anyway. Up to you. If your going to go crazy and douche the kernel, don't delete anything.... Keep the old kernel and modules around and make a new entry in your bootloader. Otherwise,

Delete

/boot/vmlinux
/boot/vmlinuz-ide-2.4.22 (or whatever it is)
/boot/System.map
(If you use grub, delete everything in /boot except for /boot/grub)

Cut

/usr/src/linux/System.map
/usr/src/linux/vmlinux
/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage

into

/boot

modify grub or lilo to reflect the changes. bzImage is what you want the bootloader to point to.

Not sure why I just posted all that when there is an awsome guide already here..... :rolleyes: Sorry....

Jon