I have been having trouble with my battery not charging. The battery seems to have good capacity — I just replaced it a few months ago. But, I can run it down, plug the laptop in, and then hours later the battery is still dead.
I found this article that seemed like it might help:
Ubuntu Productivity: Battery always 0% in Ubuntu 10.04
I tried the two things suggested on the blog: I pressed the power button for a couple of seconds while the battery and power cord were out, and I tried to start upower. I didn’t have upower as an option even for installing probably because I am still on Ubuntu 9.10.
What I haven’t tried yet is recompiling libusb as suggested in the related forum topic.