battery on notebook

[Janina Sajka]

As far as I know there hasn't been much success with acpi yet, even
though it is now bundled with Fedora. In fact, many people run with acpi
off in order to avoid various kinds of system quirks.

To answer the original question directly:

apm -m

Luke Yelavich writes:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 01:57:31PM EST, Juan Hernandez wrote:
> > Hello everyone, I have a sony Vaio fxa53, I'm running fedora c2, kernel 2.6.8.1 that I rpm upgraded from the speakup ftp.  I'd like to know how I can determine how much life my battery has?  thanks
> 
> Before you can determine how much battery you have left, you need to work out
> whether you are using ACPI or apm. To do this, find out whether there is a
> directory under /proc called acpi. Do the following:
> 
> ls /proc/acpi
> 
> If you get a few items back, you have acpi installed. To find out whether you
> have apm running, do the following.
> 
> ls /proc/apm
> 
> If you get a response back that isn't an error message, you have apm. Note
> that you can't have both at the same time. You can only have one or the other.
> 
> If you have apm, it is quite easy to determine battery life. Simply type apm
> which will give you all the info you need to know.
> 
> However, ACPI is a little more complicated. You then have to work out whether
> you have the battery module either loaded, or compiled into your kernel.
> My guess is that it will be a module.
> 
> To work this out, try and go to the /proc/acpi/battery directory.
> 
> cd /proc/acpi/battery
> 
> If this doesn't exist, you will need to load the battery module. I think the
> module name is battery, so do the following.
> 
> modprobe battery
> 
> All being well, the /proc/acpi/battery directory should exist now. Under this
> directory, there will be one or more directories. If your laptop has 2 or more
> batteries, there will be a directory for each battery giving you information
> about the batteries. The best way to find out the amount of life left in the
> battery is to do the following.
> 
> luke at luke-laptop:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
> present:                 yes
> capacity state:          ok
> charging state:          charged
> present rate:            0 mW
> remaining capacity:      42420 mWh
> present voltage:         12376 mV
> 
> The second last line is what you are interested in. It gives you the remaining
> capacity, but doesn't give it to you in percentages.
> 
> I hope this helps, and if anybody knows how to check ACPI battery capacity
> and display a percentage, I would love to know.
>  
> Luke
> 
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-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Chair
				Accessibility Workgroup
				Free Standards Group (FSG)

janina at freestandards.org	Phone: +1 202.494.7040