At Wed, 6 Aug 2008 17:32:34 -0500 (CDT) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>
> Thanks, something else to look into.
>
> Now, however, a problem, just discovered:
>
> The laptop is running, over on the other side of the room, because I have
> been involved in doing some security upgrades on it, while dealing with
> e-mail over here. So I just went over there and ran "sensors" and it says
> there are none. There is something called "smbus" connected to the PIIX4
> chipset, but it is not at all obvious what it does.
>
> The BIOS has a screen for display of battery status, so presumably this
> information needs to be read by some app, and it seems that "sensors" is
> not doing it.
Battery status is handled by either APM or APCI, depending on laptop
vintage and/or BIOS settings. Older laptops used APM and newer ones use
APCI. Modern kernels detect which. If APM, you need apmd and (x)apm to
check battery status, if APCI, the kernel creates some directories under
/proc/acpi that contain text 'files' that contain the state of the power
plug (/proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC/state) and the batteries
/proc/acpi/battery/*/{info,state}.
The sensors are handled by lm_sensor -- these include stuff like power
supply voltages, CPU temp, and CPU fan speed. "smbus" also includes
reading some proms and stuff -- can be used to identify things like
DIMMS and such like. You can try running sensors-detect (as root) and
see if it finds the sensors. You might need to load some kernel modules
to get this going.
>
> I have tried running KDE on the laptop, and it does then display a battery
> icon. But at this point it is not obvious to me how KDE is getting the
> information out of the BIOS.
See above.
>
> Any ideas what might be going on down at this, more basic level?
>
> Apparently, this seems to be turning into a major engineering project. :/
Someone already has solved it...
>
> Theodore Kilgore
>
>
>
> On Thu, 7 Aug 2008, Jesús Guerrero wrote:
>
> > If what you need are light apps to swallow them into FvwmButtons what I used
> > to use were window maker doackapps, there are quite a lot of them, and they
> > are really nice and simple to use and configure. I guess you already know
> > about them, but just in case :)
> >
> > --
> > Jesús Guerrero <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >
>
>
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