I'm having trouble configuring power management on my Desktop box. By power management I mean being able to have the system sleep/monitor shut off in a configurable time frame (e.g., through the KDE Control Center. Also, I would like to have the system automatically power down on a shutdown. I have enabled apm in my /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file as well as configuring the Power Control under KDE->Peripherals->Display->Power Control. Also, I have configured the Screen saver in KDE to be aware of power management. All that happens is that my screen does go blank, but the system does not go into sleep mode. In the past I was able to get this to work when using Dropline Gnome (no longer on my machine.) I'm using Slackware 10.2 + patches with the 2.6.13 kernel.

Ruhar, You might start by determining whether your computer uses APM or ACPI. If your computer is a newer model (say within the last 3 years) it is most likely ACPI. You can also look in the BIOS for clues. If ACPI, you won't be able to change much in the way of power management.

Since your computer doesn't shut off at shutdown (and it is ACPI compatible) I'd guess that you didn't install an ACPI enabled kerkel. That would be the first thing you need to do. Either reinstall and select bareacpi or recompile.

Dennisk

Ok. I reinstalled with the bareacpi kernel and am now able to get the auto power down functionality. Thanks. However, a couple of things. I'd like to be running the 2.6 kernel. I looked at the config of the test26 kernel and it looks as though the acpi settings are there. However, this wasn't the case when I installed the test26 kernel. Also, I'm still not able to get the machine to go to sleep through the KDE power managment configs... Any ideas? Thanks.

To get the monitor to power down, you have to add:Under the Monitor section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf - after you restart X, it will then respect KDE's requests to power down the monitor.

System suspend/ resume isn't very well supported on desktop machines at the moment under Linux (Laptops may or may not have more success with a lot of coaxing for this).

Also, with test26, IIRC, you need to install a separate modules package to get any useful functionality out of it? (Although I always roll my own kernel, so I'm not sure on the details).

That worked like a charm!! Thanks!!

PS... Check out the 'Hibernate/Resume' link in my sig.

And yes, check the kernel for ACPI options....