The resurrection of the battery

[GreyGeek]

The Acer 773G which I got back from my grandson (in exchange for my Acer with the i7 CPU and fast GPU) ran fine for the last couple of months. Last week, and since then, during power up I got a msg which stated that the battery was at 49% charge, which it claimed meant that the battery was "broken". It is always plugged in and when I unplug it the battery widget gives me a 100% charge level, which decreases normally with use. I suspect the kernel upgrade installed prior to the msg appearance.

[oshunluvr]

I'm not sure how old that Dell page is, but the software repo is off-line.

I just make my wife shut it down completely every couple of days...

[oshunluvr]

Only one BIOS available for this laptop. It worked fine until (I think) the upgrade to 11.04.

How about upgrading or downgrading the firmware of the BIOS / battery controller?
http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/firmware_tools.html

[oshunluvr]

Nothing on that thread looks like it applies to me: Charges fine when powered off - doesn't charge when powered on.

But thanks anyway

Here's something I noticed today after playing with this issue again:

sudo cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

reports:

present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          charged
present rate:            0 mA
remaining capacity:      1470 mAh
present voltage:         11943 mV

so the system thinks it's charged. That's why it won't charge unless it's off. acpi reports unknown and upower reports charging, acpitool reports charged.

Frikin' annoying

Have you looked at this -> http://en.community.dell.com/support...518/t/19248256 ?

[oshunluvr]

Here's something I noticed today after playing with this issue again:

sudo cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

reports:

present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          charged
present rate:            0 mA
remaining capacity:      1470 mAh
present voltage:         11943 mV

so the system thinks it's charged. That's why it won't charge unless it's off. acpi reports unknown and upower reports charging, acpitool reports charged.

Frikin' annoying

Now this I found interesting. Whilst looking on Linux Mint forums I found someone else with the same issue when installed Linux Mint. The consensus seems to be that it is a problem with the Dell hardware but that does not explain in my case why the battery will charge and function properly is using something like Arch but doesn't when using Ubuntu / Debian / Linux Mint.

The link to the forum post is here http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=186919

I've been looking at ways of downloading the source code for Ubuntu Linux Kernel and it appears you can only get the source code if you have installed Ubuntu, so I'm now going to re-install Linux Mint 17 (as that was the last one I had installed where I noticed the battery wouldn't charge) and then once installed will download and examine the code to see if I can spot anything which is causing the issue.

Or would it be easier to report it as a bug to Ubuntu and let them solve it?

[oshunluvr]

Hmmm, I could have sworn it was an Arch base so I assumed it used their kernels. I did install it, but it didn't allow charging either. I also ran a live NST (Network Security Toolkit) which is Gentoo based (I think ) with no difference. I'll try pure Arch today.

Well Nick. I was hopeful that Arch (via Chakra) would help me but no good - battery still only charges when powered off. I also tried a Gentoo based live distro but no different. Maybe I'll try Fedora next?

Chakra isn't Arch. It uses pacman and is a half rolling release distro but does not use Arch repositories or AUR.
Info from their (Chakra's) web site

History

Chakra was born on the net, in a small shady corner of the Freenode network, where the KDEmod developers met one day and decided to create an awesome little liveCD based on Arch Linux. Of course these goals had to be emphasized a little bit more, and soon after the initial thoughts and discussions we started to write up plans, schedules and of course develop like there is no tomorrow, while not forgetting the fun and keeping it relaxed. Chakra is our baby. A lot of efforts, time and countless hours of writing code and testing stuff have been put into it so far, but that was just the beginning... Currently Chakra has started his own path becoming an indenpendent distribution, with own repositories, packages and Kernel, an innovative half/rolling release cycle, a brigde between the stability to the latest applications, a bundle system that provides system integrated click'n'run applications and a source code based community repo.

Did you install Chakra or just run it from a live disk?

[oshunluvr]

Well Nick. I was hopeful that Arch (via Chakra) would help me but no good - battery still only charges when powered off. I also tried a Gentoo based live distro but no different. Maybe I'll try Fedora next?

I might do that. I'll try a non-debian brand. If I recall, Chakra is based on Arch and somewhat simpler to install.

I'm sure you already know, Chakra is only for 64 bit PC's.

I'm thinking of installing Fedora or openSUSE to see if the same thing happens with them.

Edit: KaOS is very similar to Chakra.

From KaOS web site

The idea behind KaOS is to create a tightly integrated rolling and transparent distribution for the modern desktop, build from scratch with a very specific focus.
Focus on one DE (KDE), one toolkit (Qt), one architecture (x86_64) plus a focus on evaluating and selecting the most suitable tools and applications.

[oshunluvr]

I might do that. I'll try a non-debian brand. If I recall, Chakra is based on Arch and somewhat simpler to install.

I just checked, and indeed my Dell laptop (Vostro V13) does not charge when powered on, only when shut down.

Would you consider installing another distro just to check if it is just Debian/Ubuntu distros? It doesn't have to be Arch.