How would I go about setting up some special laptop power management utilities where I could hibernate and be warned if battery is low etc...

Essentially what I want it to do is when my monitor gets pushed down, it pushes a button. When I had windows it started hibernation but when I try it in slackware 10.1 it just shuts off screen and doesnt hibernate.

How could I get my laptop to have extra power management utilities that allow me to hibernate and control power based on battery percentage?

Thanks

There are a couple of possibilities. If your laptop supports Suspend-to-disk, it might work out of the box. I'm not sure if ACPI "sleep modes" or APM suspend/standby support are required.

Another possibility is compiling a custom kernel with Hibernate support - it is a completely Linux-specific implementation of the suspend-to-disk, and it should work whether your computer supports "suspend-to-disk" or not.

Some laptops go to sleep automatically if the battery is low and the battery is calibrated (=shows right amount of power left). If your's is not one of these, check HOWTOs and other documentation about powersaving, from www.tldp.org, for example.

It also helps if you use the bareacpi kernel.