Re: functionality of ACPI

[Praveen Kallakuri <praveen@unlserve.unl.edu>]

i do have limited functionality from apci working for my laptop for some 
time now. like jeremy wrote, certain patches of apci do work. for eg. on 
my presario 1720, only 2.4.17 with acpi patch of 12.18.2001 works. it 
provides functions such as power-button recognition (i associated 
shutdown with this event), lid-open/close recognition and 
dimming/brightening the screen accordingly, battery status and 
temperature. shutdown actually turns off the laptop instead of just 
leaving it powered on like APM did.

i tried 2.4.18 with the same patch of acpi or later patches, but none of 
 them ever worked. like many others, i am waiting for the day when acpi 
in linux does everything that windows does! (and more)

solong

praveen

Hubert Chan wrote:
> > > > > > "Jeremy" == Jeremy Petzold <jpetzold@earthlink.net> writes:
>
> Jeremy> well, officialy, ACPI does not exist in Linux, however, there is
> Jeremy> a kernel patch for it and it will be in the 2.6 kernel due out
> Jeremy> art the begining of next year. as far as the powerdown
> Jeremy> functionality of the ACPI function, I do not know, I needed ACPI
> Jeremy> to get sound and that is all I care about. I am sure it works
> Jeremy> however.
>
> There *is* ACPI support in the current stable kernels.  But the ACPI
> subsystem is being rewritten in 2.5, so there is some incompatability.
> (Not that there are many applications that support ACPI anyways.)  You
> can fetch backports of the 2.5 version to 2.4 at
> <http://sourceforge.net/projects/acpi>.
>
> To the OP:
> Right now, though, Linux ACPI support isn't as good as Windows, because
> the ACPI standard is poorly documented and poorly implemented.  There is
> also a strange thing that if the chipset doesn't implement certain
> features (such as hibernation), it is up to the operating system to
> implement it.
>
> The best thing to do is to try it out for yourself.  (I haven't managed
> to get ACPI to work on my laptop yet (ThinkPad R30), trying both the
> standard 2.4 support, and the 2.5 backport.)  If it doesn't work, you
> can try APM if your laptop supports it.  You might not get as much power
> savings as you would with ACPI, but you'll probably be able to suspend,
> at least.