[ale] what the heck battery reading

[Ron Frazier]

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04.  I have the Gnome power management icon set to 
display all the time on my laptop.  If I left click the icon, I get two 
lines on a menu.  The bottom, preferences, lets me set the power 
management preferences.  The top line says Laptop battery is charged (at 
the moment).  However, you can click on that line.  When you do, you get 
a detailed statistics screen.  You can click on the ac adapter, the 
battery, or the processor.  If I click on the laptop battery section, 
then the details tab, I get lots of info about the battery.  It says the 
capacity of the battery is 57.7 %, but the current percentage is 100%.  
I've noticed sometimes that, when the battery is discharged, and I let 
it charge back up while Linux is running, it stops charging at this 57 % 
level.  However, if I shut down Linux and let the computer charge the 
battery while the machine is off.  It fully charges.  I think Linux is 
confused.

So, my questions are:

1) How does Linux get it's numbers, from the battery itself, or from 
calculations within the program?

2) How do I make Linux forget what it thinks it knows and recalculate so 
my battery can fully charge?  Windows seems to sense the battery's 
charge level fine.

3) Gnome power manager defaults to shutting down the pc at 1% of battery 
remaining.  I can only tell it what to do at a critical battery level, 
not what the level is.  For this machine, this is only 1 minute, barely 
enough time to shut down.  For another machine (with a UPS), that is 
only a few seconds, and would probably crash the machine.  I need to 
know how to set the levels of charge where the warning appears, and 
where the shutdown or hibernate happens.  I'd prefer not to have to load 
another power management program if possible.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Ron

-- 

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Ron Frazier

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linuxdude AT c3energy.com