Periodic apm problems in FreeBSD with R32

[lparsons]

My R32 occasionally gives me apm-related problems in FreeBSD 6.0, and I think I have figured out more particularly where they are coming from, but I still have no idea how to solve them.
I previously posted that my system would sometimes kill X automatically without warning while still having ample battery life, though after reporting to the screen that there was no battery time remaining.
Some more careful investigation into this brought me to realize that sometimes while running on battery only, apm will report

Code: Select all

Remaining battery time: unknown

while the remaining battery life (in percentage) could be any number from 1 to 100. However, it seems that the unknown status overrides the percentage and causes the system to want to exit out of X. But waiting just a few seconds longer and then running apm again will give both a valid battery time and battery charge

Has anyone else dealt with this? Any ideas how to solve it?

I bought a new battery from IBM several months ago when my original would no longer hold a charge. Genuine IBM battery, purchased straight from IBM (primarily because I couldn't find an aftermarket that would fit properly).

[lparsons]

Some help on the freebsdforums has enlightened me a little, but not led to a resolution yet. It appears that the problem has to do with the fact that I have acpi (ibm_acpi to be exact) compiled into my kernel, but KDE demands apm for its battery monitor.
To solve this, I had previously added a line to my rc.conf file to enable apm. it seems that there may be a problem in having both systems running simultaneously.

So now i have disabled apm in rc.conf, which of course means that the KDE battery applet does not detect anything - even though the apm command still gives information.

Grrrrrrr.

Any ideas? Does anyone know if the newest version of KDE has ACPI support for its battery monitor?

Maybe its time I just do like the rest of the good BSD nerds right now and switch to fluxbox or some other graphical front end instead of KDE