battery status with ACPI

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 05:57:03 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jamie Bowden <ragnar at sysabend.org>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> 
> On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Oliver Brandmueller wrote:
> 
> > Hi.
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 11:15:58AM +0200, Daniel Lang wrote:
> > > I'm looking for applications, that can display ACPI status
> > > information. Most wanted is battery status, but everything
> > > else would also be of interest (e.g. fan status, cpu speed, etc).
> > >
> > > In the ports I can only find applications, that require APM,
> > > not ACPI. The base system does not seem to provide something
> > > either?
> > >
> > > Did I miss something?
> >
> > At least for the battery status the APM applications work well for me
> > through the emulated APM interface of the ACPI. For fanspeed,
> > temperature and stuff like that this won't work.
> 
> Xbattbar doesn't.  It can grok whether the machine is on wall power or
> not, but that's it.  It cannot determine the battery level, and always
> reports %100.  This was built using the port under RELENG_5_1.

Do you have 'apm_enable="YES"' in rc.conf? Even though you are running
ACPI, the parameter is still required if you want to be able to use
the APM emulation capability. With this present, both the Gnome
Battery Charge Monitor and the gkrellm battery builtin work just fine.

Have you confirmed that ACPI is properly returning the values? 'sysctl
hw.acpi' will provide the information available from ACPI and might
also be a clue on the problem.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634