On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, Robert Heller wrote:
At Wed, 6 Aug 2008 17:32:34 -0500 (CDT) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Thanks, something else to look into.
Now, however, a problem, just discovered:
The laptop is running, over on the other side of the room, because I have
been involved in doing some security upgrades on it, while dealing with
e-mail over here. So I just went over there and ran "sensors" and it says
there are none. There is something called "smbus" connected to the PIIX4
chipset, but it is not at all obvious what it does.
The BIOS has a screen for display of battery status, so presumably this
information needs to be read by some app, and it seems that "sensors" is
not doing it.
Battery status is handled by either APM or APCI, depending on laptop
vintage and/or BIOS settings. Older laptops used APM and newer ones use
APCI. Modern kernels detect which. If APM, you need apmd and (x)apm to
check battery status, if APCI, the kernel creates some directories under
/proc/acpi that contain text 'files' that contain the state of the power
plug (/proc/acpi/ac_adapter/AC/state) and the batteries
/proc/acpi/battery/*/{info,state}.
The sensors are handled by lm_sensor -- these include stuff like power
supply voltages, CPU temp, and CPU fan speed.
I know.
"smbus" also includes
reading some proms and stuff -- can be used to identify things like
DIMMS and such like.
Is there, then, a command called "smbus"?
You can try running sensors-detect (as root) and
see if it finds the sensors. You might need to load some kernel modules
to get this going.
I did. Some excerpts from the output:
To continue, we need module `i2c-dev' to be loaded.
Do you want to load `i2c-dev' now? (YES/no): YES
Module loaded successfully.
We are now going to do the I2C/SMBus adapter probings. Some chips may
be double detected; we choose the one with the highest confidence
value in that case.
If you found that the adapter hung after probing a certain address,
you can specify that address to remain unprobed.
Next adapter: SMBus PIIX4 adapter at 0840 (i2c-0)
Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): YES
Client found at address 0x50
Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1033'... No
Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1034'... No
Probing for `SPD EEPROM'... Yes
(confidence 8, not a hardware monitoring chip)
Probing for `EDID EEPROM'... No
Some chips are also accessible through the ISA I/O ports. We have to
write to arbitrary I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe though.
Some south bridges, CPUs or memory controllers may also contain
embedded sensors. Do you want to scan for them? (YES/no): YES
Silicon Integrated Systems SIS5595... No
VIA VT82C686 Integrated Sensors... No
VIA VT8231 Integrated Sensors... No
AMD K8 thermal sensors... No
AMD K10 thermal sensors... No
Intel Core family thermal sensor... No
Intel AMB FB-DIMM thermal sensor... No
Sorry, no sensors were detected.
Either your sensors are not supported, or they are connected to an
I2C or SMBus adapter that is not supported. See doc/FAQ,
doc/lm_sensors-FAQ.html or http: et cetera.
OTOH the commanbd i2cdetect gives
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/linux# i2cdetect
Error: No i2c-bus specified!
Syntax: i2cdetect [-y] [-a] [-q|-r] I2CBUS [FIRST LAST]
i2cdetect -F I2CBUS
i2cdetect -l
i2cdetect -V
I2CBUS is an integer
With -a, probe all addresses (NOT RECOMMENDED)
With -q, uses only quick write commands for probing (NOT RECOMMENDED)
With -r, uses only read byte commands for probing (NOT RECOMMENDED)
If provided, FIRST and LAST limit the probing range.
With -l, lists installed busses only
Installed I2C busses:
i2c-0 smbus SMBus PIIX4 adapter at 0840
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/linux#
I have tried running KDE on the laptop, and it does then display a battery
icon. But at this point it is not obvious to me how KDE is getting the
information out of the BIOS.
See above.
Any ideas what might be going on down at this, more basic level?
Apparently, this seems to be turning into a major engineering project. :/
Someone already has solved it...
Good thing, too.
I think the problem is localized now, though. The acpi stuff seems to be
working and reporting information. So the question is now the same as in
my previous reply post: how to use that information and to get it onto an
fvwm button?
Theodore Kilgore
