APM/APCI on Dell Inspiron 2650

[DarkVejita]

Does anyone have information on getting the battery display working in either KDE or GNOME for an inspiron 2650?

 

I have searched the net, and most of the information is outdated, so I don't know if people have given up on this venture or not. I am trying to get MDK 9.2 installed on my Inspiron 2650 laptop and having no joy with this. Since I am on battery a lot, having something tell me how much time/power I have left would be nice.

[DragonMage]

Actually, there are some things you can do to have the battery display working in any laptop, especially for Mandrake 9.2

 

1. Install Mandrake, update the kernel to the latest (this is important, the stock kernel for 9.2 is very buggy).

 

2. After updating, edit /etc/lilo.conf. Usually in the append section, Mandrake will put something like this

acpi=ht

 

change that to

 acpi=on

Just in case, add

 noapic nolapic

to reduce the chance of kernel panic

In my case, my append section looks like this

append="noapic nolapic hdblun=0 devfs=mount hdb=ide-scsi ide0=dma acpi=on resume=/dev/hda6 "

After that, save, and run lilo

 

3. Install the acpi and acpid rpms using rpmdrake in mandrake control center, then enable those two services at boot using drakxservices in mandrake control center

 

4. After rebooting, check whether there are /proc/acpi directories with a whole bunch of directories and files. If there is a /proc/acpi/battery directory, then congratulations, you have acpi working and battery display. Then klaptop should start if you use kde so that there is a battery monitor. I am not sure about gnome, but there should be similar feature.

[coverup]

I've done exactly what DragonMage suggested... /proc/acpi/battery directory exists, but the battery state shows an error. I plugged the power adaptor back but the battery state did not change at all, still shows the error.... very frustrating...