hi all, newbie question...

hardware: dell pentium III 600 MHz
software: etch, kernel 2.6.8, latest versions of acpi, acpid

so this all started when I updated from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6 using the kernel-image package. After the install, I found that I could no longer power down my computer using shutdown -h. Also, when I halted the system and shut off the power with the power button, the computer would cold boot on its own 5 minutes later! I stopped the computer from booting itself by changing a power management option in bios, but I still can't shut down the computer from the OS. I think its because none of the new acpi modules will load. Whenver I try to load one with insmod or modprobe, I get this this error (with the processor module):

FATAL: Error inserting processor (/lib/modules/2.6.8-3-386/kernel/drivers/acpi/processor.ko): No such device

Is this what's preventing me from doing a soft shutdown? What kind of devices do the acpi drivers look for and why can't they find them on my machine?

What kernel boot options do you use?
It seems like the complete acpi is not working
Are the fans activating?

The fans seem to be working fine. Here's the entry for my kernel in menu.lst:

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8-3-386
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-3-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-3-386
savedefault
boot

and here's the contents of /etc/modules:

ide-cd
ide-detect
ide-disk
psmouse
mousedev

I don't really know what to do to activate acpi if I can't load the acpi modules. Is there a dependency or something?

Can you try with a newer debian kernel?
You will have one more entry in grub to have a try.
For example, the one in Etch. By the way, do you have a reason for keeping this kernel while you are running testing?

The modules should activate by themselves, something is wrong.

After installing the new 2.6.8 kernel did you update the modules by running

depmod -a 2.6.8

well, I couldn't make sense of this issue for months, and just ended up re-installing linux. I guess that what you're supposed to do when you upgrade, I was just fooled by the debian doc's rosy portrayal of upgrading with apt. Next time I'll know better. Thanks!

-B