I just got a Toshiba 2435 laptop, which I installed Slackware 9 on. The 2.4.20 bare.i kernel that comes with slackware works fine on it, but there is no acpi support, which means no battery monitor in kde, and several other bad things. So I downloaded the 2.4.21 kernel from kernel.org and patched it with the acpi patch. The only problem is this new kernel I compiled will not boot, it gets to OK, booting the kernel.... and just freezes. The odd thing is other distros such as Mandrake 9.1 do this too. Can anyone shed some light on this?

did u set the "VGA Text console" and "video mode selection support" in "console drivers" to YES ?

I just enabled video mode selection support and VGA Text Console but the only thing it did was cause the screen to turn blank before freezing. Arrgh! Thanks for the suggestion anyway. Does anyone with a Toshiba 2435 have any knowledge as to what's going on?

This is really weird! I unpacked and installed an unpatched, vanilla 2.4.21 kernel just now and it *still* freezes on boot, so I guess the problem doesn't lie with the ACPI patches. Some site I went to suggested that adding the option "noapic" at boot would help but that didn't work either. I really have no idea as to what's causing this madness now. Gentoo, Mandrake, etc. kernels are giving me the same trouble. If somebody with a Toshiba 2435 and a working 2.4.21 kernel could send me their .config file that would be really great, although I doubt anyone here has a 2435. Anyway, I suspect something just isn't configured right in the kernel that is upsetting my laptop.

I think you should just cut your losses and head for a Suse distibution, it'll enable acpi with no recompiling...

Yes, I tried the 2.4.21 kernel vanilla too and it did the same thing. Now oddly, if I take the .config file from the kernel sources that came with Slackware, copy it to the 2.4.21 sources directory, and then make xconfig to tweak it a little and compile. Voila! Boots up just fine. You could try that. The 2.4.21 from kernel.org seems to come with a very sparse/faulty .config file.

Thanks, indigoparadox, that gave me an idea. I downloaded and compiled the 2.4.21 kernel source from slackware.com instead of downloading the vanilla kernel from kernel.org and now acpi works and it boots up with no problem. But there is an odd thing where when I unplug my laptop it says I have 0 minutes left on the battery even though I know it is charged... how weird. What modules should I have loaded for this laptop?

I have ospm_processor, ospm_system, ospm_ac_adapter, ospm_battery, and ospm_busmgr loaded.

Now oddly, if I take the .config file from the kernel sources that came with Slackware, copy it to the 2.4.21 sources directory, and then make xconfig to tweak it a little and compile.

Did you take the .config file from the 2.4.20 kernel source or the 2.4.21 updated kernel that is on slack's website but doesn't come with slackware?

Ok, I finally got acpi to work decently. The battery monitor *was* working on that compiled slackware 2.4.21 kernel but it was giving me the wrong battery info -- it kept saying i was 49% charged when I knew it was fully charged. So I downloaded the vanilla 2.4.21 sources from kernel.org, patched them with the acpi patch from acpi.sf.net, and then used the .config file from the 2.4.20 kernel that slackware comes with. I had to manually edit the .config file to enable acpi but it works now, but there is ONE annoying thing left. The kde laptop daemon gives me the right info on percentage charged and tells me whether I have the laptop plugged in or not, but it keeps saying I have 0 minutes left and pops up with annoying messages. I have no idea why this happens.

I also can't seem to get suspend to disk and suspend to ram to work either. echo 4 > /proc/acpi/sleep does nothing.

I've created a little page describing my experience with this laptop and how to resolve typical problems associated with it on linux:

http://www.bayou.com/~troll/toshiba.html