Comment 49 for bug 629258

I can confirm this happens on the Efika MX Smartbook (armel) too with the kernel from Genesi's gitorious repository. Our battery is SBS compliant and publishes all the same power supply attributes as a standard ACPI SBS battery. There is a custom driver in play (efikasb-battery) however this doesn't seem to be the root cause; we occasionally get kernel messages that certain sysfs attributes could not be read, and battery life never estimates properly and the battery is always reported as red, and empty (0%) in the icon.

Considering SBS batteries have accurate lifetime count which is published in sysfs (pulled right from the charger) I would have expected that this be used to determine the battery life in the first instance before any clever averaging and determination of power usage is performed, and the battery life and capacity (also reported in sysfs..) be used directly since the LiIon/LiPoly charger is pretty smart (hence, smart battery..) - I can read sysfs fine and tell that I have 4h50 of battery life left give or take a minute or two (291 minutes) and the average drain time is around 280 minutes.

Quite why gnome-power-monitor doesn't seem to take notice of this data is puzzling..