Re: Power button doesn't work
On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 08:27:24AM -0600, Gary Hennigan wrote:
| "Derek Hans" <whans@total.net> writes:
| > Is it normal that my power button doesn't work?
| > After running shutdown -h now, the system shuts down and issues a
| > message saying
| > "Power down."
| > However, when I hit the power button, the computer just beeps but
| > still stays on. The only thing I can then do is a VERY hard reset:
| > take out the batteries (it's a laptop, compaq contura 400c) and unplug
| > it. Nothing else responds. This doesn't seem to be the normal way to
| > shut off a computer. Just wondering if there is a different way...
| > For the moment, I'm just letting it running all the time, however
| > there doesn't seem to be a "power saving mode" activated
| > automatically, and so the screen stays on all day. Besides, it gets
| > rather hot over time - I'm not quite sure if the fan is adequate for
| > this. I'm not decided if it's worse for the computer to shut it off
| > the "HARD" way or keeping it running all day & night.
| > Help would be apreciated.
|
...
| Third, a lot of laptops don't use a real switch for power off. Instead
| it's a soft switch. In general, if the machine doesn't shut itself off
| you may need to hold the power button down for as much as 8 seconds to
| actually get it to turn off. Even that may not work, but 9 times out
| of 10 it has worked for me.
This is true of the Dell Inspiron I use at work. Sometimes I have had
to hold the power button to "hard" power off when win2k hangs during
shutdown =p. I also used to have a Compaq Presario nano-tower (it was
_really_ small) and it too had a soft power switch. Simply pressing
it was supposed to put it in "sleep" mode while holding it for several
seconds would do a "hard" shutdown. A lot of new systems use soft
switches so that the OS can intercept the request and handle it
gracefully.
While I agree that it isn't exactly normal to unplug and remove the
batteries to power down, I think it is perfectly safe to do so --
Debian has completely stopped running when it says "Power Down" on the
screen so it expects the power to be disconnected at any moment.
Adding "apm=on" to the end of the 'kernel' line in menu.lst if you use
grub, or whatever the equivalent in lilo is, should work if the mobo
is new enough to have apm (old 486s and maybe Pentiums didn't have
it).
-D
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