I managed to get Vector Linux onto an old AST Ascentia 950N with 75mhz and 16mb ram. It's not much but it's perfect for learning C.

Everything is working fine except for one thing, the battery! Everytime, I try to run linux without the powercord being plugged in(or unplugged while running), it'll run for a little while, and then it'll permanently freeze if I leave the commandline alone for a minute.

I've tried turning on apm in linux as well as in the bios. I've taken off apm and disabled all the powersaving features in the bios, but none of it seems to help. I don't think I have acpi installed since giving the acpi command tells me command not found and I don't see any of it's modules running.

I tried running the hdparm -B on /dev/hda command to disable hard drive power saving settings but it gave me an input/output error.

I had windows 95 previously installed on here so I know it's not the computer.



Any help, would be greatly appreciated.

I updated the Bios to 3.10, and messed with the Turbo option in the bios. Still no luck.


Can someone throw me a bone?

Updating the BIOS to version 3.10 AND enabling Advanced Power Management in the BIOS solved the problem.

It was a similar bug to that which made me move away from fedora.

No problem in Slackware.

I'm glad you were able to solve it.