[ltp] T21 battery charging and draining problems

[Tom Adelstein]

On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 01:25 +0200, André Wyrwa wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > 1) The battery never seems to be fully charged.   The LED indicator gets 
> > up to blinking green but never reaches solid green.
> 
> I only have experience with totally dead batteries which make the LED
> blink orange all the time. If it blinks green i'd guess it just doesn't
> manage to last to the full bit, but don't know for sure. If the blinking
> annoys you you can use ibm-acpi to change the LEDs state.
> 
> > 2) The battery drains while the AC power is plugged in.  When I run the 
> > computer for a long time (with gentoo CD in the drive and serial port 
> > operating) the battery drains until it is blinking orange.  If I power 
> > down the laptop and leave it plugged in it gets back to blinking green 
> > but never to solid green.
> 
> From that i would judge that the ThinkPads charging circuits have a
> problem, but again, that's more a guess. There might also be a
> communications problem between the battery and the charging system.
> 
> André.
> 

You could have a bad battery but that may be the least of your problems.

With Ubuntu,my T21 battery lasts less than five minutes and it's a good
battery. On the other operating system, I get approximately two hours.

That leads me to one conclusion - Linux needs re-engineering to work on
the T21. I'm currently investigating this issue. I can do everything in
Linux I can do in the other OS and I'm using apm not acpi - which is the
correct architecture. By the time I get through the bootup process, I
don't have time to issue a suspend command, the battery starts to go
when gnome appears.

So, something within the system hardware isn't getting turned on or off.