Power Management(sysfs) /sys/power/state
 

Does anyone know why I cant write to the file /sys/power/state to change the system power state. I am running Mandrakelinux 10.0 with the linux 2.6 kernel. According to some documentation with the kernel by the name of interface.txt(im new so i cant post the url) I should be able to write to this file either "standby", "mem", or "disk" to change the state of the system. From the command line i type:

echo -n "standby" >state

and nothing happens. I can read the states and have been able to write to state files of specific devices although i cannot tell if anything is actually changing states. I am new to linux and still trying to figure a lot of this stuff out, im sure there is something that I am just not doing that is preventing this from working so any help would be apreciated. Thanks.