Suse 10.3 & battery monitor on Acer TravelMate 2304

sadiqdm · 05-20-2008, 06:58 AM

I have an Acer TravelMate 2304WMLi (Celeron M 350 1.3Ghz, 15.4" TFT, 1GB RAM, Suse 10.3(i586), Kernel 2.6.22.17-0.1default I686)

The only thing which consistently refuses to work is the battery monitor. It works with Ubuntu, but I prefer Suse. Has anyone had any luck here?

ak-87 · 05-22-2008, 04:15 AM

Just a shoot in the dark...

Check with lsmod command if ac and battery modules are loaded. Maybe because of some strange reason, SuSE didn't load them. Also try to manually load them with modprobe and then check what dmesg says.

sadiqdm · 05-22-2008, 06:39 PM

Didn't think to check the modules! Did the modprobe thing, and now I get this:

Code:

florence:~ # lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
af_packet              29064  4
battery                14724  0
ac                      9604  0
xt_tcpudp               7168  3
xt_pkttype              5888  4
ipt_LOG                 9984  8
xt_limit                6656  8

No change in KPowerSave. Tried stopping and starting PowerSave and still nothing. Rebooted and ac & battery modules not loaded. Also lm_sensors won't start, is that connected?

I've been using Suse for over 2 years, and never had this work. I haven't done a kernel compile since about 6 years ago, and that was with Slack, so I'd have to read up on it before I tried.

The strange thing is that it works fine with Suse 10.1, 10.2 & 10.3 on my Dell! I now have some work which means carrying the Acer around. If I can't get this to work, I will either have to upgrade the Dell's RAM or change to using Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE 3.5.9, or Fedora 8 with KDE 3.5.6, on the Acer. Both have the ac/battery monitor working fine, which means the BIOS & hardware do support it.

Any help would be appreciated.

ak-87 · 05-25-2008, 04:10 AM

It is quite strange that SuSE is not loading those modules automatically.:-/ I also wrote that you should check what dmesg says when you load ac and battery modules manually.

Code:

#modprobe ac; modprobe battery
$dmesg
#cat /var/log/messages | tail

Are there any error messages? Also check if YaST (System > System Services) if powersaved daemon is enabled. Check if there are any files in /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/ when modules are loaded.

Also, you don't have lm_sensors service enabled, it is not connected with battery.

sadiqdm · 06-02-2008, 11:07 AM

ak-87, thanks for the suggestions. the modprobes got no response, and no aparent power related error messages.

I looked in /proc/acpi/ac_adapter & /proc/acpi/battery and they are both empty.

I've no installed Fedora 8 as a 2nd OS and I'm going to see what that does different.