[ale] what the heck battery reading

[jim.kinney at gmail.com (Jim Kinney)]

Don't recall details but I think there's a way to calibrate the
battery monitoring app. It involves running down the battery a bit and
recharging for a while and making calculations from that. Not finding
how on a quick google search.

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Ron Frazier
<atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com> wrote:
> I'm running Ubuntu 10.04. ?I have the Gnome power management icon set to
> display all the time on my laptop. ?If I left click the icon, I get two
> lines on a menu. ?The bottom, preferences, lets me set the power
> management preferences. ?The top line says Laptop battery is charged (at
> the moment). ?However, you can click on that line. ?When you do, you get
> a detailed statistics screen. ?You can click on the ac adapter, the
> battery, or the processor. ?If I click on the laptop battery section,
> then the details tab, I get lots of info about the battery. ?It says the
> capacity of the battery is 57.7 %, but the current percentage is 100%.
> I've noticed sometimes that, when the battery is discharged, and I let
> it charge back up while Linux is running, it stops charging at this 57 %
> level. ?However, if I shut down Linux and let the computer charge the
> battery while the machine is off. ?It fully charges. ?I think Linux is
> confused.
>
> So, my questions are:
>
> 1) How does Linux get it's numbers, from the battery itself, or from
> calculations within the program?
>
> 2) How do I make Linux forget what it thinks it knows and recalculate so
> my battery can fully charge? ?Windows seems to sense the battery's
> charge level fine.
>
> 3) Gnome power manager defaults to shutting down the pc at 1% of battery
> remaining. ?I can only tell it what to do at a critical battery level,
> not what the level is. ?For this machine, this is only 1 minute, barely
> enough time to shut down. ?For another machine (with a UPS), that is
> only a few seconds, and would probably crash the machine. ?I need to
> know how to set the levels of charge where the warning appears, and
> where the shutdown or hibernate happens. ?I'd prefer not to have to load
> another power management program if possible.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>
> --
>
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
> call on the phone. ?I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
> mailing lists and such. ?I don't always see new messages very quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier
>
> 770-205-9422 (O) ? Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT c3energy.com
>
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-- 
--
James P. Kinney III
I would rather stumble along in freedom than walk effortlessly in chains.