apm and console suspend

linuxhippy · 06-14-2005, 05:08 AM

A nice feature of my laptop is that in the BIOS I have a power down feature called suspend. After 5 minutes of inactivity in the console, my pc powers down and the cooling fans turn off till a key is pressed to wake it up. This worked fine in Slack 10, kernel 2.4.31, with the following line uncommented in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules:

/sbin/modprobe apm

I recently wiped my drive, did a fresh install of Slack 10.1 and upgraded the kernel to 2.4.31. APM is enabled in rc.modules but it doesn't go into suspend mode anymore. BIOS settings did not change.

Any idea what the difference could be?

These are installed:
acpid-1.0.4-i486-2

In the running processes:

apmd is running
acpid is NOT running

My laptop is 6+ years old and needs apm....not sure if acpi should be running at the same time as apm..

uselpa · 06-15-2005, 03:09 AM

Try both the following commands:
apm -S
apm -s
Which one worked?

linuxhippy · 06-15-2005, 08:10 AM

apm -s worked right away. I didn't know there was a man page for apm...learn something new every day!!

linuxhippy · 06-15-2005, 12:22 PM

any idea how to background apm -s so that it goes into suspend when I log out?

uselpa · 06-15-2005, 12:49 PM

Just add it to ~/.bash_logout. This will not background it, but execute it immediately when you log out.
To delay, add the 'at' command.

linuxhippy · 06-16-2005, 09:01 PM

I put apm -s in my user .bash_logout and got a permissions error about apm when I logged out. As root I tried to chown and chgrp for /proc/apm and I tried chmod 0666 for /proc/apm and chmod a+x /proc/apm and none of that worked.

How can I change permissions for apm?

gbonvehi · 06-16-2005, 10:48 PM

You could configure sudo to allow sudo apm -s from your user.

uselpa · 06-17-2005, 04:15 AM

sudo is the best (have a look at man visudo sudoers sudo).
The other solution is to set the setuid bit (chmod u+s /usr/bin/apm).

linuxhippy · 06-19-2005, 12:06 AM

I tried chmod u+s /usr/bin/apm. When a user types apm -s, he gets:

Cannot open APM device: Permission denied

sudo apm -s works well but always prompts for a password. Can I indicate that a password is not needed?

keefaz · 06-19-2005, 02:22 AM

edit /etc/sudoers
I use these values as example :
username : linuxhippy
hostname : darkstar

Code:

linuxhippy  darkstar = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/apm -s

So after that you run the command as :
sudo /usr/bin/apm -s
(note that you will have to give the full path)

linuxhippy · 06-19-2005, 12:58 PM

That worked well-thanx!

linuxhippy · 07-03-2005, 07:45 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by uselpa
Just add it to ~/.bash_logout. This will not background it, but execute it immediately when you log out.
To delay, add the 'at' command.

Would you please go into detail about delaying apm -s...I want to delay it 5 minutes.

maginotjr · 07-03-2005, 11:12 PM

this is why I want to know more about sudo ;DD

for those who wandering about using sudo...

uselpa · 07-04-2005, 01:46 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by linuxhippy
Would you please go into detail about delaying apm -s...I want to delay it 5 minutes.

When I suggested that, I was thinking about delaying for a few seconds, just in order to allow your session to close properly. You could have added a simple

Code:

 sleep 5 && sudo apm -s

or an at command.

Of course, you could add

Code:

 echo 'sudo apm -s' | at now + 5 minutes

to .bash_logout. However, this is unconditional and even if you login again, you'll get suspended. Probably not what you want - if you login before 5 minutes, you'd have to cancel the at command via an "atrm".

I guess that in that case you'll have to configure your BIOS to send the apmd a signal after 5 min. Look into your BIOS options if you have a way of configuring this, and try if it works.