How does one get the laptop power management to work? I'm using MDK 9.1 DB w/xp, which was a goody in itself.

Yup, the first question I think any new Linux user with a laptop will have is how to get power management working. Some laptops it works fine, others it doesn't. It took me over two months to get my power management working half decently on my Emachines M5310 and I still have issues.

First thing, make sure ACPI is enabled by Mandrake, by default it isn't. To do this you need to open up Mandrake control center and hunt around for startup or something to that nature. There is an option to enable ACPI on bootup, or you can edit your lilo.conf file located I believe in /etc and add the force ACPI.

If you get that figured out and it works great for you, you are one of the few lucky. If it doesn't work start doing some reading up and searches on google for your laptop model and Linux.

Good luck

Thank you,sounds easy enough, I'll give that a try and post my results.

I got it to go, although not perfect it now shows battery charge and time left. I think it will also sound at 5 min warning. I modified the lilo configuation: MDK control panel>Boot>Drakeboot>Lilo/grub mode, Configure>Advanced>Enable ACPI, OK>Modify. I removed the "acpi=off" at each of the entries where listed. This information was gathered from Mandrake Expert (Navy). I want to Thank Adamis for heading me in the right direction, cool dude.