Battery not detected/monitored - Vaio PCG-K13Q

[mlaverdiere]

Hi to all,

I'm using Kubuntu Dapper on a Sony Vaio PCG-K13Q and, like many laptop users, I 'm not able to have my battery correctly detected and monitored. The strange (and a bit frustrating) thing is that I never had this problem on this laptop with other distros (all Debian based, i.e.: Debian sid, Knoppix, Morphix etc.) that I've used. It seems to be a Ubuntu particular thing, maybe related to a kernel patch or a tweak that I have not been able to pinpoint yet.

Heres' the situation:

In fact, my battery is sometimes detected at boot and then after, everything is OK. However, most of the time (2/3 of the times), it is not detected and the KDE/gnome applet and the acpi -V command indicate that there is no battery at all. The dmesg command gives me this: ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery absent). Also, if I remove and insert the battery when the system is booted up, then it is detected and everything works fine.

I've tried the following procedures, without any positive results:

- fixing my DSDT (following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ACPIBattery?...ght=%28acpi%29)
- using different kernel boot parameters (i.e. acpi=force, acpi_os_name=..., nopapic, nolapic, etc.)

Someone has an idea of what's going on and what could be done to fix this thing?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[mlaverdiere]

Re: Battery not detected/monitored - Vaio PCG-K13Q

Hi,

I've found one solution (well, a workaround...), and it's quite simple: no need to play with DSDT file (like it was suggested in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ACPIBattery?...ght=%28acpi%29, etc.), to compile a kernel or to do some other relatively complex procedures

It seems that if I unload and reload the "battery" module, everything works fine after. But before unloading the battery module, you have to unload the smart battery module, listed as "acpi_usb" with the lsmod command.


How to determine if this solution works for you:

To try this solution, do the following:

Open a terminal, and enter the following commands:

sudo rmmod acpi_sbs
sudo rmmod battery
sudo modprobe battery

Then, enter this command:
sudo acpi -V

if you see someting like this:

Battery 1: charging, 100%
Thermal 1: ok, 56.0 degrees C
AC Adapter 1: on-line

Then, voila, your battery is now detected and monitored and you now know that this solution works for you

If you don't see any reference to the battery after issuing acpi -V, the problem may be more complex. See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ACPIBattery?...ght=%28acpi%29


Fixing the problem in a permanent way:

I have created special init scripts that I put in /etc/init.d and /etc/acpi/resume.d in order to unload-reload battery module at each boot and resume after hibernation.

In a more detailed way, here's what I did and what you can do (at your own risk!):

1. Using a text editor, put the following content in a file and save it:

#!/bin/bash
rmmod acpi_sbs
rmmod battery
modprobe battery

2. Make a copy of this file, name it "modules-load-battery", make it executable (in a console, you can use the command "sudo chmod a+x modules-load-battery") and put this file in /etc/init.d

3. Use the Ksysv editor (or whatever it is called in K menu/system or in the "System settings"/System Administration/System services), in order to make this script run at each boot time (you can make it run just before the "kdm" script; it works for me).

4. Make another copy of this file, name it "37-modules-load-battery.sh", make it executable (in a console, you can use the command "sudo chmod a+x 37-modules-load-battery.sh"), and put this file in /etc/acpi/resume.d; it will run at each resume from hibernate state.


Hope this helps.