Battery charge settings (Ubuntu, Thinkpad T61p)

Apologies if this is a typical topic and I just need to do some searching, but if I understand correctly, I can't control my laptops battery charge settings like I can do in Windows with the Lenovo Thinkpad utilities.
i.e. in the Thinkpad utils, I can set the battery to start charging at 36% and stop at 40%.

I don't see any option like this in Ubuntu. Which is really fine, but here is where it gets weird.
I had my battery settings set as mentioned previously in XP. When I booted into Ubuntu, my battery was at 39 or 40% and didn't charge...at all.
I came back the next morning to look at it and the laptop was dead. Battery at 0%. Weird. I don't know if I jarred the plug loose or what, but I went ahead and plugged it in. Battery charged all the way.
I went back into XP (dual boot) and reset the battery settings to stop charging at 60% or so. Came back into Ubuntu...same thing, battery wouldn't charge, was just running of AC power.

Am I going crazy? Is that supposed to happen? I would normally just be happy and set the battery to stop charging at 40% in XP, reboot into Ubuntu and live happily ever after, but if I ever want to take the laptop off AC while in Linux...you get the idea.

EDIT: I forgot to add, I have since rebooted into XP, set battery to always charge, came back into Ubuntu and it charged to 100% and is now running of AC power. But I'd like to leave it semi-discharged most of the time as I now know it'll improve battery life.

btw, re: an earlier thread, I obviously went for the XP/Ubuntu dual boot, but once I experiment with VMs I'll think about tossing XP completely. I need to go back and update that post.

 

Have you looked at www.thinkwiki.org ? They have a lot of technical discussions on the state of utilities and how things work between 'pads and Linux. I've not seen any Linux utilites that have the functionality that you're looking for -- but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Sourceforge is another excellent resource.

 

I read something on Ubuntu's Idea pages (or whatever they are called) about writing an app/utility to do this, so I don't think it's part of the standard package (which is fine).
I will go take a look at thinkwiki - I've seen it and used it but not for this area.
What is more interesting to me is that my linux OS seems to 'remember' the battery settings from XP. =/ Cue Twilight Zone music.

 

Have a look here: Tp_smapi

 

Just enabled that on my T61. Seems as if it works as advertised... I'm running Hardy, so I just had to load the modules, but it doesn't look too hard.

 

Yes, thanks ezTol, not sure how I missed that on the ThinkWiki site.

Also enabled (although I went through the trouble of building it). Only downside is that got me looking at HDAPS, and while the sensor works, the APS doesn't (at least not without a kernel recompile?).

But at least I can maintain the battery a little better from Linux this way. Thanks again!