Hi! How do I view the remaining battery life in my laptop and how do I hibernate( maybe even standby ) it? I'm using mandrake 10 on a Dell Inspiron 600m. I've read something about ACPI. Do I just add "acpi='on'" in my /etc/lilo.conf? I'm not so good with linux. It would be great if you could be very detailed in your answers.

Although, I've tried recompiling and using a my custom kernel before when I was still using mandrake 9.1. But, when I booted using that kernel, most of my devices were no longer recognized. Even my mouse, touchpad, dvd/cd rw drive.

Thanks! =)

I am not sure about your power management with Mandrake on x86 (I am running Gentoo on an iBook), but gkrellm2 is a great system meter that works well for viewing laptop batteries as well as CPU, memory, disk IO, etc, etc.

You might want to check out using APM as an alternative to ACPI.

ok. i'll look into that. I also have another problem. Whenever I shutdown my mandrake, It doesn't actually turn my pc off. It says 'power down' yet the screen is still on.

I had the same problem so I did this:

in the drake control center (or whatever its called) I installed the packages that had acpi in the name (2 of them)

then i went to the directory /etc and looked for the file lilo.conf and in the part for linux there is a line that says "append=". in this line I added acpi=force and save the changes to the file. I did the changes as root bacuase otherwise the changes wouldn't save.

Also, in the drake control center (not sure about the name) in the boot section, go to the lilo/grub configure button. in the wondow that pops up there is a check box that say "Enable ACPI", check it and save all the changes. Thsi last part, I'm not sure if it necesary but I did it anyway.

After doing all of this, I got the battery metter to work and my laptop powers off by itself. I still have found out how to hibernate though. Let me know if this helped, or if you find he command to bibernate.

Hey It worked!! Thanks a lot arson! I really appreciate it. I'll look into how to get it to hibernate. I'll notify you if I could make it work. thanks again.

I found: http://swsusp.sourceforge.net/index.html

I haven't tried it yet (may be tonight) Anyway, this seems to be a mature SF projects. I think it should work.

Enjoy,
Nawa

thanks for the link. I still haven't tried the patches. I still have to find out what kernel I use. Imagine, I don't even know that. I'm telling you, I'm a newbie. Let me know if it worked for you.
Later.

I've got a 600m as well, running Debian sarge with kernel 2.6.9
if you recompile the kernel make sure you have either compiled-in or modules for all your devices; also the wireless will probably conk out, so have the driver for whatever card ur 600m has ready to recompile too
also, don't bother trying APM, the 600m only supports the newer ACPI standard... which is a shame, because from what I've read APM works perfectly under linux while ACPI is still full of headaches. on that topic (although this next bit might not apply cause I'm using a different distro) don't bother with swsusp, it doesn't work. generally ACPI sleep states and hibernating don't seem to work properly on the 600m either. I've tried the standard kernel ACPI stuffs and the ACPI patches from the sf.net project of that name, as well as different versions of swsusp and they don't seem to work... basically your laptop won't be able to go into sleep mode (at least until someone figures out how to make it do so)
although if there's anyone who knows more about this stuff and/or who has got it to work, please let me know!