No Battery indicator on Dell laptop
Forum: Laptops
Topic: No Battery indicator on Dell laptop
started by: dtf
Posted by dtf on Mar. 05 2006,17:02
Dell Latitude L400 P3 700MHZ ULTRA THIN LAPTOP NOTEBOOK I currently have DSL 1.5 installed on the above laptop and I would like to upgrade to DSL 2.2. It seems that reverting to a early kernel from 2.0 has resolved some wireless card issues I was having with DSL 2.0 and 2.1. However there is still one item I would like to get working if possible, the battery indicator. Running from the live CD dsl norestore disk I cannot get the battery indicator to show anything while using the battery or AC. In addition I see the following errors that point to a some problem.
amp: overridden by ACPI
insmod: /lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/arch/i386/kernel/apm.o init-module: No such device (however the file DOES exist)
It also indicates that parameters or interrupts might be incorrect and to check dmesg for additional errors.
Checking the system stat dmesg tab I find this error
i8253 count too high resetting
This is repeated multiple times.
Additional information is provided about the amp BIOS
amp BIOS version 1.2 flags 0x03 (Driver Version 1.16)
While it is not essential tha the battery indicator works it sure would be nice.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Posted by hs7sv on Mar. 06 2006,03:40
Your laptop is using ACPI. DSL-2.0 and DSL-2.1b support ACPI. You can use DSL-2.1b and wmacpi_1.99r7.dsl for battery indicator. Please read < this thread > for more detail.
Posted by dtf on Mar. 06 2006,12:12
hs7sv - thanks for the pointing me to the information related to this topic. I was hoping to go to DSL 2.2 on the DELL laptop because of wireless card issues I was having using 2.0 and 2.1. But this gives me some things to try and see if I can find something that will work. I will let you know the results.
Posted by dtf on Mar. 07 2006,16:28
hs7sv - I followed the thread you suggested and it works as you said. Cool!! But I am still struggling with my wireless card on 2.1b so I will see if I can resolve that issue. The card works fine on the earlier kernel but maybe I can figure out what the issue is. Thanks again for pointing out the thread for the battery indicator.
Posted by doobit on Mar. 07 2006,16:45
what wireless card?
Posted by dtf on Mar. 07 2006,17:33
doobit -D-Link Air DWL-650 - Chipset: Realtek 8180.
This card works with minimal trouble using the earilier kernels with DSL 1.5 and 2.2 but I run into trouble with the 2.4.31 kernel DSL 2.0 and 2.1(x). What I have notice with the older kernels is that the card is assigned to eth0 interface and in the more recent kernels it assigned wlan0. Things I have tried.
I downloaded the driver listed on the D-Link site and expanded it but there was not a <xxxx>.inf driver so I was not able to try using ndiswrapper with it. The most progress I have made is using the Prism2 tool from the DSL control panel. You can actually see some valid data (MAC address) with ifconfig -a for the wlan0 interface. However, I think that I run into problems when I attempt to execute iwconfig wlan0 essid <my_sid>. It says something like invalid operation or operation is not supported. So I am wondering if it might not like my choice of sid (althought this same sid works with interface eth0) or perhaps it does not like the wlan0 arguement. If you have any ideas let me know. Thanks.
Posted by clivesay on Mar. 07 2006,17:47
If it worked on the earlier kernel you're in business because 2.2 went back to the 2.4.26 kernel.
Posted by dtf on Mar. 07 2006,18:02
clivesay - yes you are right the wireless card works with 2.2 but not the battery indicator. So I can go to 2.2 with my wireless card but no battery indicator or go to 2.1b with the cool battery indicator but the wireless card does not work. Well, maybe I am just getting greedy. You know DSL is great, so I am not complaining, just trying to get most I can out it.
Posted by doobit on Mar. 07 2006,19:04
There is a great post about a battery indicator script here:< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....4;st=10 >
Also, someone here posted, with some desperation, that they would pay to get their Realtek based card working in DSL, so please post the details of how you did it in the networking forum.
Posted by dtf on Mar. 07 2006,20:16
Bingo - I got the D-Link DWL-650 card working with DSL 2.1b. I believe there might be a problem with the script /usr/local/bin/prism2.sh. The lines that read wlanctl-ng "$1" lnxreq_wlansniff enable=false channel "$2"
wlanctl-ng "$1" p2req_channel_info_results channel "$2"
should read
wlanctl-ng "$1" lnxreq_wlansniff enable=false channel="$2"
wlanctl-ng "$1" p2req_channel_info_results channel="$2"
I believe the '=' sign is the correct syntax but I should test this idea some more. I noticed walking through the script one line at a time that the channel does not get assigned without the '=' sign being there. In addition to this issue, the line wlanctl-ng "$1" dot11req_mibset mibattribute=dot11WEPDefaultKey0="$4" requires the encryption key to be formated as "NN:NN:NN:NN:NN" ( the ':' is required between each two hex numbers ). Once I made these changes the pump -i wlan0 was successful and I could obtain an IP with dhcp. I will repeat this test and document it in the appropriate forum.
If someone else would like to confirm (or refute) the syntax error that would be helpful.
Posted by hs7sv on Mar. 09 2006,17:37
dtf, Since your wireless card works on DSL-2.1b, I have another good news for you. Now, we can see ACPI Battery State in torsmo. Please read < this thread > again.