On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Marvin Renich
<mrvn@renich.org> wrote:
* Peter Rapisarda <peter.rapisarda@gmail.com> [110401 10:38]:
> Hello all,
>
> I am a student who is just learning LINUX for the first time so I basically
> have NO idea what I'm doing so please be patient with me. In an attempted
> 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 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...
[snip]
This should not have anything to do with the operating system installed.
Try shutting down the laptop, leaving the battery in and the power cord
plugged in. If the battery has not gone bad, this should recharge the
battery in a few hours. Then, unplug the power cord and turn on the
laptop. If it doesn't come on at all, you need a new battery; this is
what I suspect from your description. If the computer comes on, but
Linux does not run properly, post back with details, e.g. the
power-on-self-test (POST) runs normally, but it cannot find a bootable
disk.
To add to Marvin's reply, a lot of Dell laptops have the battery indicator light flash orange/red in some repetitive fashion if the battery falls below a certain level/ability to hold a charge - it's somewhere around 35% of the original battery charging capacity. So if you see the constantly blinking light on your laptop, your battery is kaput.
Mark