First off, I should let you know that I am a brand new Linux user. To give me advice. You have to use small words and good directions. That said......HELP!

1) I'll take this one problem at a time. I have a Presario 2175US laptop running Mandrake Linux 9.2 and I can't get the power manager to work. I'd be content to just find out my battery life right now. When i click on the icon, it says power manager not found. When I right click, I get KLaptop and Configure KLaptop, but neither one works. I've seen stuff about ACPI and APM, but I don't really know what to do with any of that stuff and most people don't seem to have the same problem as I do.

2) I have a touchpad mouse on my laptop that right now does nothing. What do I need to do to make that happen?

That's it for now......thanks.

Wes

One more thing I forgot:

3) I have a HP psc 1210 printer that installed fine, but then never actually worked. I would tell it to print a test page and it would send it, but the printer never got anything.

Wes

Sorry, you can ignore the thing about the printer. It works now.

Wes

New problem:

4) CD-ROM drive: I can write to the drive, but I cannot read. I click the CD-ROM icon on the desktop and it says that it expected a directory and found a file. If I go to mnt/cdrom, it says I do not have enough permissions to read it.

To see the battery level on your laptop you will need to have either APM or ACPI enabled. Luckily for you, Mandrake 9.2 comes with both. In my experience APM was on by default with Mandrake so if you're having problems you might want to try ACPI. You can see which is installed and running by going to the Mandrake Control Centre and clicking on the System / Services tabs.

To enable ACPI, go to the Mandrake Control Centre and then to the section Boot. There should be a tickbox there "Enable ACPI".

That should be all. If ACPI has not yet been installed you will be asked for the installation CDs. You might then want to double check that ACPI is enabled in the System / Services section and that APM is disabled (they shouldn't both be enabled at the same time).

You could then try different applications which show you the information that ACPI provides (battery life, cpu temperature) such as akpi or kacpi (even though the icon you are using will be enough to show battery life).

Thanks for the help, now I just need to figure out abou the cd-rom. I know that it can read and write because I've installed modules from it. I just can't look at the contents. I have tried to mount it, but I am getting an error that says '/mnt/cdrom is a file, expected directory'. Any suggestions?

Look at your /etc/fstab file. There should be a line in there that corresponds to your cdrom. Mine is:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
these mean, respectively, device file, mount point, filesystem type , options. (the last two digits are flags would should stay 0 0 for a removable filesystem).

If you're getting an error that /mnt/cdrom is a file, maybe you should remove the file, create a directory called /mnt/cdrom and then try:
mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
or if you have already specified an entry in /etc/fstab you can just type
'mount /mnt/cdrom'.

This is the only line in my fstab about the cdrom:

none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0

Should i change it or add a new line?

i don't know how supermount works. i think it allows you to change cds without having to remount the drive to get access to them.

you could try the full command i posted earlier, and if that works you can replace the existing line or add a new line in fstab to /mnt/cdrom1 or something similar.