I have a Dell Inspiron 4100 Laptop running Slackware 9.1 with 2.4.23 kernel, and it has very minimal and virtually useless acpi support because of a buggy dsdt. I have downloaded the utilities need to dump the dsdt, disassemble and re-assemble it.

When I compile the dsdt unmodified I get 2 errors and 16 warnings, but I am not sure how to go about modifing the code because I do not know the language.

Does anybody have a fix for this laptop already? or maybe some links to get me started on it? Any help that can be offered would be appreciated.

Well, it seems that I have fixed my own problem so as it may be helpful to others here is the solution I came up with.

I found a dsdt patch for Dell Inspiron Laptops at:
http://sandcat.nl/~stijn/freebsd/dell.php

It says that the patch is for BSD, but it worked fine with linux. Then to find out how to apply the custom dsdt ( the kernel needs to be patched, there are a couple different methods ) I went to http://acpi.sourceforge.net where they had some howto's on the subject.

So now I successfully have working (at least for the most part) acpi for my laptop! Hope this helps.