HP ZE1210

[Tim Lewis_2]

Can anyone suggest how I can get the power meter to register correctly using Mandrake 9.0? I compiled the kernel to activate the battery monitor and have recompiles turning on and off every option. Even trying to compile each of them as modules. The best I can do is get the monitor up and it displays 0%. I know the Adv Power Management is working because the fan runs a whole lot less now. However, it does not go into standby.

[Michael Brailsford]

You need to use ACPI, not APM. I could not get power monitoring to run with APM compiled into my kernel. Check out acpi.sf.net and get the kernel patches there. You will need to compile your own kernel and enable ACPI and disable APM. When you do this then you will get lots of useful information from /proc/acpi, like cpu temp, battery state, etc.

[Tim Lewis_2]

Let me try to be more specific. I recompiles my kernel, based on Michaels original posting about getting his HP to work, without apm.

Everything seems to work well. If I open /proc/acpi/ I can explore the battery folder and the status script tells me exactly what the charge on the battery is, if it's plugged in, the current state, etc. And as Michael stated I can even view the processor temp. in the same manner.

However, the problem seems to be the Gnome monitor applet itself. Although this information is obviously available to the system, the battery monitor applet only reports 0%, regardless of the state of the battery.

Is there another monitor I could try installing, or is there a patch to make this one work. I tried installing the acpid package from the site Michael suggested but it seems to have no effect on it.

[Bruce Copeland]

I'm not aware of anyone who has been able to adapt the gnome battery monitor. However there are quite a few other 'solutions' out there. [Search google for something like 'gnome acpi battery monitor'.] Personally, I like the GKrellm monitor with the gkacpi-0.3 plugin. I installed the gkrellm package as part of redhat 8.0, and then downloaded the gkacpi source from http://gkacpi.sourceforge.net/. You need the source because the ACPI names have changed a bit since gkacpi-0.3 was released. I applied a diff patch from http://cpbotha.net/clevo5600/clevo5600_linux/
and then still had to edit the source a bit more to be compatible with the latest proc/ACPI directories and file information. I'm hoping to have my web page for "Red Hat 8.0 on a ze4100" up by the end of the weekend. Unfortunately one of the things I still have to do is the final gkacpi diff. That still may not help you because I've heard reports that the names used in /proc/ACPI come from the ACPI DSDT table in the bios. If so, you may need to make your own changes to gkacpi source (and probably most of the other 'monitors' out there).

Bruce