annoying audio error message: "battery is fully charged

[voldemort_b]

Hi,

Newbie here. Installed Knoppix to harddisk, making it Debian unstable. I'm using gnome. Dell Latitude laptop. I'm getting this very annoying audio message, about every minute: "Battery is fully charged. Please embark a power supply." Note: I've been running the computer plugged in the whole time. Does anybody have any idea 1) what's responsible for this message, and 2) how to disable it? I've been looking around in all the menus on the desktop for ages, but haven't found anything helpful.

Oh, I doubt this has anything to do with it, but I have a UPS attached to the computer via serial port.

Thanks in advance,

V.

[Stephen]

Hi,

Newbie here. Installed Knoppix to harddisk, making it Debian unstable. I'm using gnome. Dell Latitude laptop. I'm getting this very annoying audio message, about every minute: "Battery is fully charged. Please embark a power supply." Note: I've been running the computer plugged in the whole time. Does anybody have any idea 1) what's responsible for this message, and 2) how to disable it? I've been looking around in all the menus on the desktop for ages, but haven't found anything helpful.

Oh, I doubt this has anything to do with it, but I have a UPS attached to the computer via serial port.

Thanks in advance,

V.

I would say go in the Control Center -> Power Control -> Laptop Battery and in the Battery tab uncheck the Notify when battery is fully charged option.

[voldemort_b]

Thanks for the try. But looking through the menus in Gnome, I didn't find a control center > power control. The only thing I COULD do, which I tried, was to right-click on the bar at the top of the screen, choose Add > Utilities > Battery Monitor. Then if I right-click on the icon and chose preferences, I DO have an option "notify when battery is fully charged". That was checked, so I cleared the checkbox. But unfortunately, I'm still getting the annoying audio message anyway. Checking the preferences again, I see that that option is NOT selected anymore. Yet the message still comes.

Please help me - it's SOOOOOOOOOOo annoying!

V.

[Stephen]

Thanks for the try. But looking through the menus in Gnome, I didn't find a control center > power control.

V.

It would be in KDE so no wonder . I never use Gnome so cannot be of much help here, the only thing I can think of is use lsof /dev/dsp when it happens and see what program is using it for the output that may give you a clue as to what is going on or maybe running top in a console window and see if you can catch the process as it is happening.

[voldemort_b]

I tried that (lsof /dev/dsp) but it didn't return any value. I had it pasted into a terminal window, and waited to hit enter until the message began. Still, nothing.

Next time I log in I'll try loging into KDE to see if I can do what you previously suggested that in there.

Anybody else have an idea?

Thanks,

V.

[voldemort_b]

When I wrote before that lsof /dev/dsp gave me no results, that's when I was running it as a regular user. After posting my previous reply, I decided to try it as root, and it DID give me a result:

COMMAND   PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE   NODE NAME
flite   24929 root    3w   CHR   14,3      128047 /dev/dsp

So pardon me for asking, but what do I do with this information? What do I do now?

Thanks,

V.

[Stephen]

When I wrote before that lsof /dev/dsp gave me no results, that's when I was running it as a regular user. After posting my previous reply, I decided to try it as root, and it DID give me a result:

COMMAND   PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE   NODE NAME
flite   24929 root    3w   CHR   14,3      128047 /dev/dsp

So pardon me for asking, but what do I do with this information? What do I do now?

Thanks,

V.

Well normally you would do something like this.

>$ apt-cache search flite
eflite - Festival-Lite based emacspeak speech server
yasr - General-purpose console screen reader
flite - A small run-time speech synthesis engine
flite1-dev - A small run-time speech synthesis engine - static libraries
libflite1 - a small run-time speech synthesis engine - shared libraries

To try and find out what the program does (if you want a more detailed description apt-cache show flite) and it looks like you have the culprit now you can either use kill 24929 (the PID number) as root and see if it solves the problem at least till you restart while making sure your sound still works for other programs. If so then you may want to kill it off everytime you start or look into removing the package (apt-get -s --purge remove flite) if the simulation does not want to remove half the system then you would check out what the other packages it would remove do and see if you can live without them if you can then remove the packages by taking the -s out of the line.

[voldemort_b]

the PID seems to change at each instance of the message, such that when I do kill after the message has already been said, it says "no such process".

Also, if flite's a speech synthesizer, I'd much rather find who's SENDING flite the instructions to give me the stupid message than just killing flite. Maybe one day there'll be other messages that I *will* want to hear from flite. It sounds kind of like plugging your ears when your kid's screaming, instead of figuring out WHY the kid's screaming and getting him to stop.

[voldemort_b]

Okay, I found the solution, and I'm posting it here in case anyone else experiences this problem and can't figure out how to deal with it.

As I thought before, flite isn't the culprit. In fact, flight's a pretty cool little tool. If you have it installed, try typing in a shell:

echo "hello there, how are you today?" | flite

You will then hear your computer say those words. Maybe silly, maybe unnecessary, but cute.

Even though I didn't want to remove it (yet), I did

apt-get -s --purge remove flite

just to see what stuff it would remove (note the important '-s' there, so that it doesn't actually remove anything). It showed me that:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  abc* flite*

Next I did apt-cache show abc, and lo and behold:

Description: Battery information and Audio Allarm
 This Script provide a Configurable
 Speaking Allarm for Battery Level Monitoring.

Ignoring the spelling mistake, I tried running 'abc' to see if it was configurable, but bash said no such command. So I did 'man abc' and found out that there were two scripts that it used, one called "battery_monitor" and one called "battery_level_control". Examining both the man page of "battery_monitor" and the actual file itself (I used "whereis battery_monitor" to locate it), I discovered that it only invokes "battery_level_control". So I checked out "battery_level_control", edited it with nano, and commented out the lines that dealt with a full battery. And it worked!

Now, if my battery ever runs low, it will tell me. When it's full, though, it does nothing. Just what I wanted. Who in the world immediately unplugs their computer once the battery's full, anyway? At least the person who made the script should have made it configurabe!

To close, this should be a lesson to me and everyone else about not installing things that you don't necessarily want or need. Right at the beginning, after I installed linux on my HDD, I wanted to get and use "ABC" - "Another Bittorrent Client" that I'd been using in windowsXP. From their website it seemed that they had a linux version as well. So without checking that 'abc' was the correct package for it, I just did an 'apt-get install abc', without knowing what it was really installing. And that turned out to be the source of my troubles!

Thank-you Stephen for helping me solve this.

V.[/b]