Hi, I have a laptop running Gentoo (with dual-boot to Windows XP). It was manufactured in 2004 and battery life have been consistent for all those years. However, it sat dormant for almost a year, after which I did a few days worth of updating to bring it up to current kernel and ~amd64 package levels. There are two issues that have arisen:
1) The smart battery is not so smart anymore. It only charges about halfway, then the charging light turns green and it stops. Effective battery capacity is about one-third of what it used to be. From what I understand, while Li-ion don't have "memory" like old Ni-Cd batteries, the "smart" circuitry cannot account for power drain that happens when the battery is not in use. Say the battery lost half of its power while it was in storage, so the chip thinks charge is at one level when it is really much lower. When recharging, it stops when it is "full" even though it's only halfway there. Has anyone successfully re-calibrated one of these batteries to recognize a larger capacity? My understanding is that, to do this, I should discharge at a constant rate until it is empty, then charge to full. Repeat ?? times. I've drained the poor little battery after regular usage (not a constant rate of discharge) a few times and haven't noticed any change so far. So I'm probably doing it wrong (or completely misunderstanding...) This is complicated by my second problem: 2) If I click on the Power Management in the KDE system settings, it says "Number of CPUs 0" "Number of batteries 0" and battery-related options are greyed out. Since battery monitoring does not work, I have no idea how much battery life is left and have no warning when it suddenly shuts down, causing filesystem corruption and who knows what other problems. Everything in /proc/acpi/battery/ seems normal and /proc/cpuinfo does as well: $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info present: yes design capacity: 4400 mAh last full capacity: 1984 mAh battery technology: rechargeable design voltage: 14800 mV design capacity warning: 300 mAh design capacity low: 100 mAh cycle count: 0 capacity granularity 1: 32 mAh capacity granularity 2: 32 mAh model number: 01ZG serial number: 1020 battery type: LION OEM info: SMP $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state present: yes capacity state: ok charging state: charged present rate: 0 mA remaining capacity: 1984 mAh present voltage: 16384 mV $ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 28 model name : Mobile AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3000+ stepping : 0 cpu MHz : 2000.000 cache size : 512 KB fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good bogomips : 4009.21 TLB size : 1024 4K pages clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: ts fid vid ttp That all seems to look normal to me, so I'm not sure if I'm missing some setting somewhere else. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Paul
