Description:

The MSI PR200 (MS-1221) laptop has historically had a number of acpi issues with the linux kernel. one of these is that after a relatively short amount of time, the operating system "looses track" of the battery, so that regardless of the actual state of the battery, battery monitor programs report it as empty. Sometimes it also has difficulty detectig whether or not the charger is plugged in.

These problems were fixed in 2.6.26, but the fix does not seem to be reflected in the arch kernel. I believe this has to do with some patching done at the distro level. I grabbed the PKGBUILD for kernel26-2.6.26.2-1 from abs, commented out the line that applies arch patches, recompiled, installed and rebooted, and the battery detection works perfectly. (I was having the aformentioned issues with it when using the stock arch kernel.)

Here is the relevent kernel.org bugreport:

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10855

As far as I know, an upstream bug causes this problem for all kernels prior to 2.6.26, but as of 2.6.26, the bug is no longer present upstream.

Let me know if I've failed to include relevant information, or there's something else I can do.