3 hours more hunting around uncovered the following idea which works for me. Adding acpi=force to the default (first) kernel line in the boot menu list at the end of /boot/grub/menu.lst (a) causes the battery icon to show and, (b) more usefully, prevents the suspend every minute behaviour. It would appear that the install does not detect the battery on some machines (my Compaq laptop install gave me no problems of this type).
-- Power manager does not see batteries https://launchpad.net/bugs/76557 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
