Hi,

I recently installed Mandrake 10 community on my dell inspiron 8600 and everything is working fine, except for 1 minor problem. When i shutdown the laptop, either by the gui or shutdown -h or whatever it will run through all the power down sequences however it won't automatically turn it off. Its not really a big problem, but it is annoying that i have to wait for it to power down so i can manually switch it off. I've scoured the web and found a number of people have the same problem both in kernel 2.4 and 2.6 (i'm running 2.4) but i can't seem to find a solution. The really annoying thing is if i use the 2.6 kernel i can power down correctly however i can't get performance profiles/ cpu scaling to work :S
It's really bizarre, i'm sure it's just a configuration problem but my linux knowledge is limited. Can someone give me the definative solution?
Thankyou!

Are you using APM or ACPI?
Does your battery monitor work?

i'm using acpi. Battery monitor works, fans work, cpu scaling works. Hibernate and suspend don't work however, but i'm not really concerned about that.

Did you compile your own kernel?

no. I don't know enuff about linux to do that sort of thing. A few other posts i read said that i should put a few options within my .config file. Should these options take effect when i reboot or is that to do with recompiling the kernel?

No it will not take effect on boot. The .config file is what you use to compile your kernel.

ahhh ok. So how do i go about compiling the kernel? Does mandrake make this easier for me?
Cheers for your help by the way. I appreciate your prompt replies.

Ah I don't think you need to. I was just wondering. There are some options you can specify if your power management doesn't work correcty but I just realised that they're all for APM so they don't apply to you.

I don't currently have Mandrake installed. However I would look at the log files as you press the button.

Probably a file /var/log/acpid, maybe it would be in an acpi folder in /var/log.


Look in /var/log and find the log file for your acpi and tail it while you press the button.

tail -f /var/log/acpid

you should see the event logged. If there is no obvious error then look at the event name.

[Sun May 9 22:25:40 2004] received event "button/power PWRF 00000080 00000006"
[Sun May 9 22:25:40 2004] executing action "/usr/sbin/acpid_proxy button/power PWRF 00000080 00000006"

You need to check the /etc/acpi/events folder and make sure you have a file there that has the command there to execute for the registered event. Some kernel acpi may be different and that would break the function. It may require the event file to be edited or the registered event added to the event file to match the registered event.

If your using acpi_proxy like mine shows above then you would edit that file instead. the default file in /etc/acpid/ should have instructions about the proxy.


If you can check it out post the file contents of the event file in /etc/acpi/events, the proxy config file if you are using that. Probably would be /etc/sysconfig/powermanagement, and the output of the registered event in the acpid logfile.

Hi,

Ok i did what u said. No errors were reported when i shutdown using the logout-> turn off computer option. It was a similar call to yours except mine was,

received event "button/power PWRF 00000080 00000001"

the event i have linked to it is /etc/acpi/events/power
and all that is in that file is /sbin/shutdown

Does the logfile show that it registers the event? If not you might need to edit the event file to something like this..

event=button/power *
action=/sbin/shutdown

Try passing nolapic in the append options in your /etc/lilo.conf. Don't forget you have to run lilo as root after editing lilo.conf for the changes to be recognized.

OMG it worked! Thanks heaps for your post. You don't know how long this problem has been slowly driving me insane! woooooop