Peter Rapisarda wrote: > to complement my studying I decided to resurrect an old laptop which is a > Dell Inspiron 2200 with a Intel Celeron M processor. The hard drive had > gone bad so I replaced it Should be fine. My main laptop is of similar vintage. I have replaced the battery however. > and purched a verison of debian off of OSDisc.com and used that to > install debian on my "new" system. Everything works great except > when I start up the computer i get a message that says: > > Time-of-day not set - please run SETUP program > WARNING: The battery cannot be identified. > This system will be unable to charge this battery... That message would not come from Debian. I believe (not 100% so beware) that that type of message would come from the BIOS at boot time when it runs its POST (power on self check). It wouldn't have started to load the OS yet. Old machines sometimes have problems with the hardware clock because the backup battery on the clock will have died over the years. This can often be fixed easily by replacing the battery which is usually a very common CR2032 battery. For a desktop with an always available internet connection this is usually a don't-care because the OS can set the clock at boot time from an internet time source. For a laptop this is somewhat more important because if you boot away from any network connection then it will probably think the time is 1970 at the zero integer time of the Unix epoch since the clock usually returns 0. Depending upon how you use your laptop this may or may not annoy you or others. You can probably ignore it if you understand it. Old laptops sometimes have problems with failed batteries, both main batteries and clock batteries. Different manufacturers do different things with the main battery information. Some will report 100% even if the battery can't hold a charge. It isn't unusual to need to replace the battery on old laptops. > Is this a problem with the battery itself, or did I install something > incorrectly maybe? If I leave the laptop plugged in it works like a charm, > but the second I take the plug out of the wall (even with the battery > inserted into the laptop) it shuts off. As you can imagine this is > extremely annooying and I have no idea what to do. I don't want to go out > and purchase a new battery until I'm sure that's the issue. Any help would > be greatly appreciated. I think your problem is mostly likely a worn out battery that is no longer servicable. To know for sure you will need to look at the data for the battery. Run this command and see what information is available: find /proc/acpi/battery Then print the contents of any "state" or "info" files that are shown there. On my machine I have BAT0 and the following files. The names of the directories may vary somewhat depending upon what BIOS and ACPI subsystem exists on your machine. Vendors will show different units. Pretty much every vendor will have somewhat unique data here. You need to look at it and then deal with the result. $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state present: yes capacity state: ok charging state: charged present rate: 0 mW remaining capacity: 70010 mWh present voltage: 12393 mV $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info present: yes design capacity: 77760 mWh last full capacity: 70090 mWh battery technology: rechargeable design voltage: 10800 mV design capacity warning: 3504 mWh design capacity low: 200 mWh capacity granularity 1: 1 mWh capacity granularity 2: 1 mWh model number: IBM-08K8193 serial number: 107 battery type: LION OEM info: FLT This tells us that my battery is designed for 77 watt-hours but is currently only holding 70 watt-hours. It is plugged into power at the moment so so the discharge rate is zero. This shows a degradation from new condition to 90% of design. It is a relatively new battery and so this looks pretty good. But an old and worn out battery may only show a last full capacity of 10 watt-hours or worse! If you post your information about your battery then folks on this list can help diagnose it. Bob
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