From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a2) Gecko/20040521 Description of problem: Many notebooks / laptops have problems reporting battery levels which can be fixed by workarounds such as reloading the acpi kernel modules. When the battstat applet fails to read the battery info (on my machine it can appear as if the battery is not present) it stops trying. Even if the acpi info is fixed the applet will not show the battery level. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-applets-2.6.0-5 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. have acpi implementation that incorrectly shows no battery present 2. have battstat applet running showing 'n/a' 3. perform acpi workarounds (eg. reload battery module) Actual Results: battstat applet does not change from n/a even though battery info is available Expected Results: battstat applet does should update, maybe after a short delay Additional info: Getting my machine working with ACPI is a work in progress. I may be missing events relating to the battery etc. The workaround I'm using involves a sleep script that removes and reloads the battery and ac modules when suspending. It's final action is to kill the battstat applet. When the user OK's reloading the applet it has the correct info available from ACPI.
Thanks for the report - I can verify from looking at the code that it only checks for ACPI support on startup. Tracking this bug upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148094 A workaround is "killall gnome-panel", btw :-)