Battery may be broken
If you get the “Battery may be broken” message you’re most likely running Linux and Gnome. This a gnome-power-manager feature that displays the low capacity warning for broken batteries.
This can be annoying so here’s how you can get rid of it:
- install gconf-editor (yum install gconf-editor on Fedora / sudo apt-get install gconf-editor on Ubuntu)
- run gconf-editor and navigate to apps–>gnome-power-manager–>notify
- uncheck low_capacity
That’s it.
Other battery info can be displayed with ‘cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info’.
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I think there is some kind of bug in CentOS which results in this message misreporting battery capacity. I have a Dell Latitude in which I regularly swap HDDs between a Windows 7 instance and a CentOS 6.4. I shut down Windows 7 with 100% battery life. Then i swap drives and bring up CentOS 6.4 and it immediately shows this alert, reporting battery capacity of about 47%. All the while with AC power supply connected. I don’t want to sweep the alert under the rug, I want to see it. But only if it’s accurate.
@erik: that’s actually a feature, not a bug. As opposed to Windows which only shows the percentage charge for the current capacity, Linux also displays the percentage of current capacity vs the design capacity and that is in fact what the warning is about, in other words even if the battery is 100% charged, it will last less than expected by design as its capacity has decreased with time.
A sample output from my machine shows the battery capacity after ~2 years of usage is below 50% of the original:
cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/{info,state} | grep "capacity:" design capacity: 5616 mAh last full capacity: 2500 mAh remaining capacity: 2500 mAhA late but heart-felt THANK YOU!! for this.
It was driving me crazy every time it came up at each boot-up of my otherwise excellent version of Scientific Linux.
Now, it’s gone. Thanks!