toshiba tecra 8000 ACPI or APM?
 

Greetings,

I have a Toshiba tecra 8000 with Mobile Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz CPU and 128MB RAM
I have been trying a few distro's on it: first Slackware 10.0 , then SuSE 9.1 and then Gentoo. I finally decided that Slackware 10 would be the best option and it is now installed, using the 2.4.26 kernel.
I am having much difficulty with getting APM configured since trying SuSE 9.1. According to a pdf brochure I found on the internet, APM 1.2 is supported, but when I compile the kernel with APM support it is unable to detect the battery. When I unplug the AC adapter the laptop immediately suspends.

The BIOS menu says nothing about APM, but does mention "ACPI BIOS version = 9.00". The first time I installed Slackware, everything worked: it detected the battery, unplugging AC adapter caused the backlight to dim and executing "apm" gave an estimate of the battery time remaining. But then I installed SuSE 9.1 which used ACPI and since then I have not been able to get APM working in SuSE, Gentoo or Slackware.

I am currently trying a kernel with ACPI support and modules and that isn't working out either (i.e. cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state reveals "present: no"), but at least the system doen't go nuts when I decide to unplug the AC adapter.
My questions: Does anyone else have similar experiences with APM? Should I update the BIOS? Is there anything SuSE might have changed in the BIOS? Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

JJ