[Debian-eeepc-devel] 701 battery capacity has wrong dimension?

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:49:42PM +0100, Patrick Strasser wrote:
> The ACPI 3.0b specs[1] say in chapter 10.2.2.3 that providing 
> percentages in the ACPI Battery Status (_BST) is OK as long as the 
> battery is "primary", that is, not rechargeable. The EeePC has 
> rechargeable batteries, so this can not apply. Both Battery Status and 
> Battery Information (_BIF) should report capacities in mAh or mWh.

Then the fact that it does report in percentage is a bug in the EeePC
firmware or battery firmware. (I suspect the last.) But it is
definitely not a bug of the firmware that some software can't cope
with it.

> In the Debian Wiki[2] Lutz said '[Lutz] Battery indicator works fine
> with last BIOS and kernel 2.6.25'. I'm running a EeePC 4G (=701?)
> with Bios 1101 and Debian stock kernel 2.6.26, and it's not working
> for me.

What exactly is "not working" for you? I've got stock Debian 2.6.26 on
a 4G (701, BIOS version 0910), and it "works fine" for me -- which
means: The applications I use to display the battery capacity (acpi,
lxpanel) display it correctly:

1/0/0 root at nemo:pts/0 13:00:42 [~] # acpi -V
     Battery 0: Full, 100%, rate information unavailable, design capacity 5200 mAh
  AC Adapter 0: on-line
     Thermal 0: ok, 30.0 degrees C
     Cooling 0: Processor 0 of 7
2/0/0 root at nemo:pts/0 13:00:48 [~] # uname -a
Linux nemo 2.6.26-1-686 #1 SMP Thu Oct 9 15:18:09 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
3/0/0 root at nemo:pts/0 13:01:01 [~] # 

I know that there are others (at least one or two of the dozens gnome
panel apps) which don't display the battery state correctly.

So IMHO the kernel does everything right, independently of the type of
battery. Just not all applications can cope with batteries reporting
in percentage although it is allowed and officially in the standard.
If an application can't cope with that, I would file a bug report
against that application.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
Axel Beckert - abe at deuxchevaux.org, abe at noone.org - http://noone.org/abe/