"Broken Battery" message on boot

[BobK54]

Just updated my eeepc 900 to 4.6.1 and it works GREAT.  Effects working just fine.  The only thing I have run into is a "Your battery may be broken" message which appears as soon as my desktop comes up after login.  After completing the desktop load, the message disappears and all is well.  The battery is not broken, it is fully charged.

The funny thing is....this machine ran Mint for a while which had that exact same message on boot.  That was a known *buntu fault. 

Any ideas what is going on?  Thanks!!!

[T6]

if you are running gnome this was already reported here

you should search for that on this forum

[BobK54]

Sorry, running KDE.  First sentence was not so clear....I thought saying "4.6.1" would be obvious it's KDE. 

Therefore:  I get a "Battery Broken" message in KDE 4.6.1 as my desktop is appearing.  Has anyone else experience this problem?

[nixer]

You are not the only one that gets this message.  I got it too.

Actually I got two messages.  The first one says that my battery is only capable of holding a certain % of its total capability.  The second message says something about its having a certain % of what it is capable of holding now.  I don't know exactly the difference but in looking at it, it might mean something like...

The laptop battery can only hold this % of charge, versus what it was when it was new.  It is then that it says something like getting a new battery.  Does it recognize that my battery is about 2 years old?

Then the 2nd message-
The laptop battery currently has this % of power left in it. 

This may sound confusing, and my words are not exact since I do not have the laptop with me now.  But I want to ask, is kde that smart now that it can tell what the capability of battery is now (in the first message), versus what it was when it was new?  The second message was self explanatory, but the first message has me wondering.

I may be totally off-base with this, but I was just reading the difference between the two messages and trying to understand what it was saying.

[T6]

inside the battery there is a circuit reporting this info to the laptop/netbook, when the battery is new it should report a specific amount of amperes and volts, when time passes batteries decrease their performance, some faster than others, specially when the cells are high capacity ones

the other report i mentioned was running gnome but was basically the same

it looks like the eee has a weird error reporting battery status with current kernel and desktops

[BobK54]

It's not a big deal but it showed up only when I updated from KDE 4.5.5 to 4.6.1 so I'm assuming it has something to do with updates in the 4.6.1 software.  I'll live with it.

[BJF]

My 701 Eeep reports the same dead battery message on boot with LXDE 2010 final. I had pretty much decided that the 9.6v battery in the thing put it under the monitor's radar, although the battery charge level and warnings report accurately. As such, it ceased to be a concern.

[T6]

so it seems to be a eee thing

what makes it special?

[BJF]

A lower-voltage battery?

[escapingsummer]

I know this link involves Fedora but it has fixed things for my EEE pc. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Eee_PC

[AndrzejL]

You are not the only one that gets this message.  I got it too.

+1. My battery is bad.

Andy

[The Chief]

so it seems to be a eee thing

Nope - also get it on my Compaq. A bit disconcerting the first time.

[AndrzejL]

so it seems to be a eee thing

Nope - also get it on my Compaq. A bit disconcerting the first time.

I have seen it on Packard Bell / Dell / IBM Thinkpad and few other brands that I was upgrading lately. In all cases battery is very weak or non-existing. If this eeepc has a good batter it must be a bug but in all my cases its more of a hardware failure.

Regards.

Andy

[AndrzejL]

Got the screenshot of the error.

Andy

[Texstar]

Got the screenshot of the error.

Andy

Is that the battery monitor plasma applet?

What happens if you add ec_burst=1 to your grub boot line when booting the kernel?

What does the following command say when executed from the terminal?
$ solid-hardware query 'IS Battery'


Addendum: it appears the kde developers were busy writing a new frontend before the backend exists for this.