I made my first submission to an open source project! (Well, I attached the patch to Novell’s bugzilla where I had filled the bug.)

My laptop does not report back the rate the battery is being depleted correctly. The Gnome-Applet, Battery Charge Monitor, reports in a mouse over that the time remaining is unknown. However, when the low battery warning comes up, it says that there are -1 minutes of battery remaining.

Here is how B-C-M does its calculations

From acpi-linux.c

407   remain += read_long (hash, “remaining capacity”);
408   rate += read_long (hash, “present rate”);
409   g_hash_table_destroy (hash);

Line 408 reads the present rate from /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state. (BAT1 is my battery.)

The present rate of discharge for my battery is always 0 mA. Which is wrong.

A little farther down in the same file

422   if (rate && !charging)
423     apminfo->battery_time = (int) (remain/(float)rate * 60);
424   else if (rate && charging)
425     apminfo->battery_time = (int) ((acpiinfo->max_capacity-remain)/(float)rate * 60);
426   else
427     apminfo->battery_time = -1;

Since my rate is always 0…..I fallout at the end: battery_time = -1.

From battstat_applet.c

514   remaining = g_strdup_printf( ngettext(
515        ”You have %d minute of battery power “
516        ”remaining (%d%% of the total capacity).”,
517        ”You have %d minutes of battery power “
518        ”remaining (%d%% of the total capacity).”,
519        info->minutes ),
520        info->minutes,info->percent );

The above prints part (The offending part) of the text that prints in the low battery warning. info is the apminfo structure. So info->minutes for me is always -1. How to fix?

A simple if statement around the above:

514   if( info->minutes >= 0 )
515     remaining = g_strdup_printf( ngettext(
516        ”You have %d minute of battery power “
517        ”remaining (%d%% of the total capacity).”,
518        ”You have %d minutes of battery power “
519        ”remaining (%d%% of the total capacity).”,
520        info->minutes ),
521        info->minutes,info->percent );
522   else
523        remaining = g_strdup_printf( “You have unknown minutes of battery power “
524        ”remaining (%d%% of the total capacity).”,
525        info->percent );

Now I get the else…I am not too sure of the language. But I wanted to keep it similar to what is currently working other places. Now I think I am suppose to submit it to the mailing list…..?

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