I'm having a problem with the way my (first and only) Linux laptop manages
battery charging and AC use.
This is a Toshiba Satellite M35X-329, (Centrino) 80 gig HDD, half-gig RAM.
Phoenix BIOS, already updated to the newest version available from Toshiba.
There don't seem to be any BIOS setup options relevant to charging / AC
behavior.
Software is Ubuntu 9.04, fully updated. (I have 8.04 available in another
partion.) No Windows.
In brief: Software doesn't seem to be switching the laptop to AC power when it's
available. Battery charging is normal with the laptop off, or when sitting on
the Grub menu. When booted into Ubuntu, it will run on battery only. ACPITOOL
reports AC adapter online/offline correctly, but reports that the battery is
discharging. The laptop is neither running off of AC, nor charging the battery.
(The AC adapter is cold.) I have more test details - but I don't think they
will add much.
Web research has left me with the entirely reasonable desire to load an ACPI
kernel module specific to this hardware. Unfortunately, "sudo modprobe
toshiba_acpi" generates a "fatal" error: "No such device". This page
<http://memebeam.org/toys/ToshibaAcpiDriver> suggests that error occurs on
Toshibas with non-Toshiba BIOS (mine is a Phoenix BIOS). It also suggests that
I can use an Omnibook driver, and refers to SourceForge.net. (I guess that
Omnibooks and some Toshibas are related, under the hood.)
Soooo... now I'm looking for an Omnibook driver. I've found the one on
SourceForge: source code only. I've tried to compile it - without success, so
far. (I haven't been inside a *NIX kernel since 1983!)
That's a long lead-in for a few questions:
Does anybody know of a repository where I might find ready-to-go ACPI drivers?
Can somebody help me "learn to fish" (compile the module from source)?
Is there another solution for this kind of laptop issue?