ACPI and APM woes

[stratocastor666]

Installed Gentoo 1.4rc2., 2.4.20 kernel ( from kernel.org) on Dell inspiron 4150 and when just all acip built into the kernel, everything will poweroff, and standby fine, but will not find battery. Gives this in dmesg
"ACPI: Battery socket found, battery absent"
So , building in all the APM support into the kernel will find battery, but APM overides ACPI in boot up, and then will not "poweroff" or "halt" it will just reboot. So now Im at a point were this is a minor problem, but just wanted to know if anyone could shed some light on it. Thanks for any help!

[hertog]

For now it is either APM or ACPI, and whichever is loaded first at bootup, is used, and excludes the other.

Try a APM only kernel, and see if stuff gets better... However, I don't know if this will make much of a difference, since acpi gets excluded by loading apm, having the same effect as not having it compiled in.

Have you checked linuxlaptops (google) for some proper kernelsettings for the dell?

[Tucs]

I'm the same computer, i had problem with acpi. Then i flashed bios.
Check if you have the lastest bios on dell website.

Now, it's work properly.

[stratocastor666]

After you flashed the bios, did you use apm or acpi? I will try this either way, but am hoping to use acpi. I tryed a kernel with just apm options enabled, and when I run a poweroff or halt commnad, instead of auto powering off, it just reboots. The acpi kernel will auto poweroff, but no battery status. Will try the ol bios flash today. Thanks for the suggestion.

[grishnav]

Try using the ACPI patch instead of the ACPI functionality included with the vanilla kernel. It works much better.

emerge acpi-sources

IIRC.

Be careful, though. When you emerge it, it will create a new directory under /usr/src/ with the patched kernel, seperate from your other. You'll need to be sure to redo all of your configuration options in the new one; the ebuild doesn't attempt to merge a current kernel config with the new patched copy.

[stratocastor666]

Thanks... am downloading now, and will get back to you all when done.

[stratocastor666]

Computer now can recognize if battery is present or not, but cannot read battery level. It will always give warging that battery is about to run out, when really its fully charged. Weird stuff popingup when Im booting the ACPI patched kernel in dmesg. Detects two battery slots, which I guess their are actually two, just that one being used, but theres a bunch of processor stuff saying:
dsobject-0189: *** Warning: Buffer created with zero length in AML
So apparently the battery is being detected now, but the level is not read. All the acpi options in the patched kernel were built into the kernel, not as modules. Also compiled in dell laptop support. WIll try a few other things, but if anyone has any more ideas, they would be welcome. Thanks

[iamtired]

what apm options did you compile for the kernel? i use apm and the battery meter works fine as does shutdowns and reboots.

The only options i have enabled as modules are:

APM Bios support
Make cpu idle calls when idle
Enable console blanking...

[stratocastor666]

What kernal was that, gentoo, or vanilla??

[iamtired]

I am using the gentoo sourses, 2.4.20-gentoo-r1

I think i had that problem with the 2.4.19 gentoo kernel but that was only because i enabled the "Use real mode APM BIOS call to power off". At least that's what i remembered. try selecting no for that option if you have that selected.

For some odd reason, acpi didn't work for me, and caused segfaults. Everytime i tried loading battstat in Gnome, it would segfault with acpi. Now, with apm, it works fine.

Did you ever get lm_sensors working? just curious.