# ACPI problem - not reading battery level

## stratocastor666

Have the 2.4.20-acpi kernel from emerging acpi-sources. Will say that battery is present in dmesg it shows that its detected as BAT0. Is saying something about Dell with broken bios. Its dell inpiron 4150, have upgraded bios to A05, newest one. Cannot read battery level with acpi, and with apm I am not able to poweroff, it will just reboot. Any info or something else I could try would be greatly apriciated. Thanks.

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## BradN

Try using 2.4.18 with one of the newer (or older, failing that) acpi patches.

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## stratocastor666

Why 2.4.18? Will try, but just wondering.... I have had this working with 2.4.20 with other distros other then Gentoo.

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## artooman

From what I understand, this is a problem with a buggy Dell BIOS.  This is fairly common with various Dell laptops from what I have read.  The ploblem lies in the DSDT which is some table that the kernel needs to interact with ACPI functions.  Some people on the internet have managed to fix this table on various laptops.  i have a Dell D600, and I just applied this fix and finally have a battery meter.

Here is where I found some modified DSDT tables.

http://acpi.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FixedDsdts

Here is are two souces for how to appy this table.  They helped me out:

http://www.cpqlinux.com/acpi-howto.html#basic_steps

http://acpi.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/HowToOverrideTable

You might want to search around for a fix on your specific model and see if someone fixed it already and posted the dsl file.

Hope this helps.

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## pi-cubic

hey buddy  :Smile: 

Do not use kernel 2.4.20 with the acpi-patches! The patches up to those for the 2.4.21-pre4 do have a bug that causes the keventd to set the system under full load. This is told to be fixed in the patches for the final 2.4.21-kernel. I recommend using the 2.4.19 with acpi-patches (as I do). I don't know if it's fixed in the 2.4.21, maybe someone here does....

greetz,

pi-cubiq

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## artooman

Oh yeah.  I got it all working with the 2.5.71 kernel.  There is no ACPI patch for this, but I didnt need it.  I just needed to modify the kernel slighty.  Details were in the websites somewhere.  If you need any help on that, let me know.

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