i installed rh9 on an inspiron 5100, which had been done before alot. i have read a few guides and got everything to work well except the pwer control.
i have read teh athe patch makes my present kernel unstable.
i dont mind not having the power control, if it makes my laptop unstable, but i have a problem . . . .
whenever i shut the laptop off with the power button it reboots and gives a lot of file system errors. i have to manually fsck to correct this. when i shut down correctly this does not happen.
i have used partition magic 7 to create all the partitions because druid did not work.
i am dual-booting xp.

this comp is for my parents and i am trying to get them into linux. this is stopping me from doing that.

which kernel are you using?
uname -a
why would you need a patch? (ie where did that idea come from)

try the command
modprobe apm
or
apmd
or
apm

and see what happens
anytime you shutdown your linbox without cleanly unmounting drives, fsck will run and show errors, becuase that's what the scripts say..

keep posting

i have changed kernel's three times now i am running 2.4.20-27.9.
'modprobe apm' yeilds;
modprobe: Can't locate module apm
'apm' yeilds;
No APM support in kernel

i read
"This was actually the toughest thing about this laptop. It's quite useful to have some sort of way to determine much Battery life is left. APM will not work, and the ACPI support in 2.4.20 will not cut it. Don't give up. You can make it work. Here's what I did"

from http://cabibbo.physics.wm.edu/~bryan...piron5100.html

and "Supported by 2.4.22 kernel but does not work without new dsdt.
Update 12/21/2003 kernel 2.6.0:
The ACPI support was compiled into kernel. Battery and CPU temperature monitoring work. Lid and powerbutton do not work (yet)."

from http://oboc.ucdavis.edu/Marik/inspiron/

and "o the Dell laptops suffer from
the same 'off by one' BIOS bug that some other makes have?"

from http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...st/001472.html

this is a pretty well documented laptop so i am happy for that.
so i asume that acpi is the way to go, and not apm, if i am wrong please let me know.
also, about the reboot issue, i have redhat on my other box and if i shut down manually, it will ask 'press y to check file integrity' or somthing like that.
if i choose not to press y then it will continue and boot normally.
on the dell if i choose not to hit y then i can not boot untill i manually run fsck.

on another note occasionally when i do shutdown normally it will not turn off . it shuts down and stops at
'Power down.'

thank you for you time. on a different note, are you really in bagdad?

ok, on the acpi issue, it sounds like a documented bug, so try to go with the same method others have used, and run acpi... try just compiling it into the kernel and be sure you have acpid installed, and see what happens, check any documentation you can find for specifics, if you get lost, or need help along the way, just send links, and we can check the docs, and tell you what they mean..

on the reboot issue, i'm still not completely getting it, but it sounds like, "on another note occasionally when i do shutdown normally it will not turn off . it shuts down and stops at 'Power down.' " power management is not running. if this is the same one with the acpi/apm issue, that is why, the apm use real mode power down, or something like that lets the atx software off feature work in lin, there is an equivalent in acpi also.. if your trying to just hard power it off, that is definetly a bad idea, and i would hope an fsck is forced, it's better than finding random inode errors on the disk..

yes i am in baghdad, merry christmas, duck.........

sorry about the lack of progress. i am back in school so i am no longer with the dell. thank you anyway. when i get back home i will begin to work on it again. thanks