re: shutdown problem

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@shellworld.net>]

Apparently debian tries to use acpi by default and I suspect your bios may 
be too old.  You might try acpi=force lapic as two boot parameters on the 
kernel lines in menu.lst.  After that's done try aptitude dist-upgrade as 
root and when that's finished try shutdown -h now and power off the system 
if necessary and wait a minute then power back up and after logging in as 
root do shutdown -h now and see if anything improves.  I have a Dell over 
here with circa 1999 cmos and acpi won't run without acpi=force here.  A 
consequence I found with not having acpi running is that cd burning 
doesn't work.  I'm using the speakup version of debian but at kernel level 
2.6.18.  When I have this system shutdown, it actually works and the 
system turns off.