8.04 Laptop Battery Issues

[rastakid]

Hi all,

After downloading and burning the 8.04 ISO released today I quickly ran the LiveCD to see what's new :) So far, so good. Although there's a lot of new good stuff in it, there's one problem which may keep me hooked on 7.10: the support of my laptop battery.

I'm running Ubuntu on a MSI Megabook S271, the battery is identified as model: 'MS-1058'. The problem: Hardy Heron does not recognize the correct state of the battery or its charge level. With no external power connected Hardy Heron reports the battery as being charged, stating it's 0% charged).

If I boot the LiveCD with 'noacpi acpi=off' it simply boots without the battery indicator (as expected). The problem is that I really like it when the laptop shuts down cleanly when there's only a little battery juice left.

Does anyone else come across this issue?

- Vincent van Scherpenseel

[msingletary]

Yes, I am experiencing this exact issue on a Sony VAIO VGN-N385E.

Hardy does not detect when I am on or off of battery power and instead reports that "Computer is running on AC power" at all times.

Any suggestions?

[zombiepig]

Same behaviour here on my wife's S271 - on AC the battery indicator will alternate between 0% and 100% charging, on battery power the indicator incorrectly states it's still on AC.

[acron1]

The battery and charge state is correctly identified for my laptop in Hardy.

[Schiphol]

Same here, with a Philips Freevents. With 6.06 I used to work w/o battery all the time. Now, I can't take it off or the laptop won't run :(

[frenchtomytoast]

I'm running into the same problem on a Sony VAIO VGN-FZ280E.
It worked perfectly in Gutsy but on a clean install of Hardy, it doesn't work.

Thanks to anyone with some advice.

[zzottt]

I have the same problem on a HP/Compaq 6910p

[zombiepig]

here's a bug report for it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi/+bug/218094

It'd be good if everyone affected could add their details in, so there's more chance of finding a fix. One temporary fix that works is to hibernate and rewake the laptop, and for some reason the battery indicator works after that (on an s271, anyway).

[zzottt]

"hibernate and rewake the laptop"

didnt work for me :(

[rastakid]

I found the following work-around suggested in the bug report to be working for me :)


A workaround that is working for me (so far) is to add msi-laptop to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, which will prevent the msi-laptop module being autoloaded.

One-liner for your terminal:


sudo echo "blacklist msi-laptop" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Kind Regards,
Vincent van Scherpenseel

[2hot6ft2]

Sony Vaio PCG-FXA48

I don't thing the default "Power Management" works right.

I installed kpowersave (it's in the repositories) on my PCG-FXA48 rebooted to xp and made sure everything was fine there as far as the battery was concerned (fully charged and being read) then rebooted back into ubuntu (while running on battery) and the battery info shows up like it should.

Even ran it for a couple hours on battery mousing over the battery indicator once in a while and it gradually dropped and gave a realistic estimate of charge left.

It finally got down to 15% left a few minutes ago at which time I plugged the power back in and it now shows it on a/c power and charging when mousing over it. 17% and charging with 30 mins. of approx. battery run time left.

kpowersave will be in Applications>System Tools when installed and it has a few more options than "Power Management"

[Hakantan]

I have a toshiba l10-102 always shows on AC power no matter what. But the percentage decreases when i pulled of the plug. It is working perfectly fine on gutsy gibbon:(