Laptop shutting down while idle
 

Hey guys,

I have a fresh install of 10.1 on my laptop and so far am loving slackware. The only problem I have is that if I close my laptop and leave it idle for a couple of hours (sorry, I can't get more specific then that) it will shutdown. No other distro/OS i've used has done this so i'm not sure if this a feature in Slackware that is there to conserve battery for the laptop? (I have it plugged in so it's not the battery dying).

So my question is, is this a feature? If so how do I disable it. If not, are there any logs I can look at/any other troubleshooting features?


Thanks for your time :),

-vicious

Have you installed ACPI?
If yes, then open Control Centre and configure Power Management

A few places to take a look at:
/var/log/messages
/var/log/syslog

Try to locate the time when it aprox. had shutdown, and see if theres anything noteworthy. Also, on boot, does it check your filesystem? Its pretty quick, but if you read carefully, it might be there. (Can be found in the syslog after boot) Oh yeah, this happens atleast with ext filesystems, am not sure about reiserFS. This might give us a clue to whether the machine shutdown clean or forced.

Also one theory could be that closing the lid will stop the fans, but nothing else. Things overheat and an emnergency shutdown / BIOS halt takes place. So, also some temperature checking should be noted.

One last thing, what was open when you closed the lid? KDE? A virtual console with no KDE in the background? Some other window manager? Basicly, were there any components beside raw APM / ACPI interfearing with powermanagement?

For ACPI or APM to be loaded and active, youll have to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and uncomment the sections enabling them. Also configuring them wont do any harm, but I have no idea on that as I cant find a config file for neither. But, im sure 'man apm', 'man apmd' and 'man acpid' will tell you more.