Hi folks,
about two weeks ago I posted dozens of mails wanting to know how to get
ACPI running on my Acer Travelmate 630. Many people helped me - thanks
to all of them!!!
I want to give back my experiences with ACPI. Here they are:
[A] Preconditions
1. ACPI support is not compiled within the standard RedHat kernel.
Neither RH 7.3 nor RH 8.0. (Mandrake has)
2. Your hardware must support ACPI
[B] Installation
1. Get a new kernel from http://www.kernel.org. I took the latest
stable one - 2.4.20.
2. Get an acpi kernel patch from http://acpi.sourcefourge.net. Be
patient to download the appropriate patch corresponding to your
(new)kernel. In my case, acpi patch 2.4.20.
3. Patch the kernel. Go to /usr/src/linux, then type # patch -p1 -i
<infile> to patch your kernel.
4. Configure your kernel. You must decide weather to tacke APM or
ACPI support. If you select both, set the kernel-flag apm=off in
your bootloader to activate ACPI or acpi=off to activate APM.
As we want to use ACPI, it is best only to select ACPI support.
5. Select the ACPI options you want to use. It seems to be best to
compile them hard into the kernel as battery status as module
won't be loaded at system start.
6. Recompile the kernel. Instructions how to perform this task can
be found at RedHat online docs.See
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux
7. Reboot your machine and pray... :-)
[C] Consequences
1. Though kernel 2.4.20 is claimed to be stable it seems to be a
little bit bugious, i.e. versions.h is missing. This file is
needed by some applications to compile properly. I copied the
versions.h from an older kernel and edited it by hand. Now it
works fine.
2. Numerous battery monitors won't work due to interface
incompatibilities. With this I mean these smart applets in the
task bar. Well, Mandrake ships with a tool called kacpi designed
for KDE 3.x to replace the old battery monitor. But what about
RedHat? And even if you can recompile the mandrake tool on
RedHat, what about our Gnome users?
3. Sometimes, just when I'm coding a program, my machine shuts down
immediatly without any warning. No idea why. I can only guess
the acpi team at sourceforge are doing good work, but still are
working on a final release which will work best. Gosh, if this
this is the only bug... Hey! Anyway, servers will NEVER run with
PowerManagementSupport.
To all of them who still want to try ACPI under Linux: just try it. It's
worth the work!
Good luck,
Arthur Miller
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