# acpi command gives no output

## juniper

hello,

i have two laptops.  on one i type acpi and i get

     Battery 1: discharging, 57%, 02:05:48 remaining

and the other i get nothing (the two laptops are different).  as far as i know, acpi is running and working on both laptops.

the laptop where the command doesn't work has noapic as a boot parameter.  i have no idea what that parameter does or if it is the cause of my problems.

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## skwang

I think there may be come confusion about ACPI.  ACPI is a hardware standard that allows the operating system to interface with power management features of the hardware.  When you type 'acpi' in the command line you are running a user-space program of the same name that accessing information the kernel report.  The kernel is responsible for interfacing with ACPI hardware.  When you tell your second notebook to boot with the noacpi parameter you are basically telling the kernel not to use the ACPI interface with your hardware.  That isn't a very exact description and I'm sure hardware experts out there will correct me on this.

Try booting the second notebook without the noacpi parameter and see what happens.

Although it won't help you with your hardware problem, I recommend acpitool (sys-power/acpitool) for a good commandline interface with your ACPI features.  Of course you can run acpid (sys-power/acpid) which is will run in the background and coordinate what happens when "events" are triggered, e.g closing the lid of the notebook.  I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that your are using a user-space program of the same name as the hardware standard (acpi vs. ACPI).

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## juniper

i am aware of the distinction, but i wasn't clear because the kernel option is "noapic" not "noacpi" so i was wondering if they were related.

ok, i will try and boot without noapic

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## skwang

No they are not related and I feel really stupid   :Smile:  .

Still, try acpitool and run it with acpitool -e (for everything) on the second notebook.  It may give you some more info.  You could also try ls /proc/acpi and cat /proc/acpi/(something), but given my track record so far you'd best ignore me   :Laughing: 

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## juniper

 *skwang wrote:*   

> No they are not related and I feel really stupid   .
> 
> Still, try acpitool and run it with acpitool -e (for everything) on the second notebook.  It may give you some more info.  You could also try ls /proc/acpi and cat /proc/acpi/(something), but given my track record so far you'd best ignore me  

 

no worries, nobody is perfect.

what does, then, noapic stand for?

also, i can certainly view all that info via /proc/acpi/ etc but it is much easier to type "acpi".

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## skwang

APIC is Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apic.  As for what it actually does I haven't a clue, my computers don't seem to use it.

As for /proc/acpi: if you have entries in that directory and you can access then with 'cat /proc/acpi/<foo>' then perhaps the problem is with the 'acpi' tool itself?  Maybe some permissions problem is preventing 'acpi' from reading the entries in that directory?  I guess that's why I keep preaching for you to use another utility program, to see if it's an ACPI problem or an 'acpi' problem...

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## juniper

 *skwang wrote:*   

> APIC is Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apic.  As for what it actually does I haven't a clue, my computers don't seem to use it.
> 
> As for /proc/acpi: if you have entries in that directory and you can access then with 'cat /proc/acpi/<foo>' then perhaps the problem is with the 'acpi' tool itself?  Maybe some permissions problem is preventing 'acpi' from reading the entries in that directory?  I guess that's why I keep preaching for you to use another utility program, to see if it's an ACPI problem or an 'acpi' problem...

 

sure, i will give it a try.  as for permissions problem:  i don't know, acpi gives nothing for root as well.

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