I am running Redhat 7.3 on my laptop. For the life of me I can't figure out how to change the power settings. On battery power my laptop goes into sleep mode after about 5mins idle. Where and how to I edit this? Also how can I edit the idle time before the monitor shuts down?

Thanks

I have run Suse 7.0, Redhat 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 on different laptops. The problem is that laptop hardware (and power management) is very model specific, so the chances that an able Linux kernel hacker ever got round to writing routines for your brand and type of lap top are erm..... sub-atomic.

The ways to change laptop power saving characteristics are :

- using the bios setup -> you can change hdd, screen and standby idle timeouts there. Look at the startup screen for instructions on haw to access. Even CPU speed can be changed, on some machines.

- Using Windows : On dual boot machines, change setting in windows and reboot. Chances are that they will survive the reboot, and continue to be used under Linux.

- Using Linux : only limited support. the 'apm' command can report battery charge% or even usage left. The command 'shutdown -s' can force your laptop in a 'suspend' or 'standby' mode.

HOWEVER : There are quite a lot of laptops with 'buggy' APM bios-es around. Even between models of the same brand ! Running a 'shutdown -s' on such a machine has unpredictable effects, ranging from 'nothing happened' to 'I had to pull the AC mains AND the battery from the laptop before it wanted to reboot'.
Since manufacturers have abandoned APM in favor of ACPM, these bugs are not going to be fixed. And since documentation on ACPM is (to say the least) 'not widely available'.........

Hope this helps

Thanks for your reply precipice4gh. I see that power management isn't as easy as I thought.

I have a IBM thinkpad R31. The linux installation itself had issues with the battery monitor on the panel. Basically I couldn't use the mouse unless the monitor was disabled. I will try chaning in bios.