On Wednesday 06 August 2003 06:04 am, OS wrote: > > Have you tried to update the BIOSes on those guys? ACPI is the > > replacement for APM. > > BIOS updates don't appear very common for `older' laptops. After all they > would much rather you bought a new one. The last BIOS update for my > Inspiron 7000 was about 2 years ago. I modded the processor, RAM and hard > disc but with no input or support from Dell who basically don't care about > systems this old. >
OK i went through a few test runs for the inspiron 8100 and 4000. Here's how I got their battery meters working with APM. ACPI unfortunately does not work in either of them even with BIOS updates etc. The inspiron 4000: Although a BIOS update is not necessary the newest BIOS update wont hurt. By default Mandrake installs ACPI which will not work so all I did was removed acpi, acpid, and changed the lilo option acpi=yes to acpi=no. Restarted... and voila.... APM works and i can monitor my batteries, suspend, and standby. The Inspiron 8100: This one was a pain. A BIOS update IS required for this one. I had applied an update before but nothing... I got the latest update yesterday the A25 BIOS i think and went back into mandrake.... ACPI still doesn't work :( Kept saying something like "***Warning buffer created with 0 length in AML", "Dell Inspiron with Broken BIOS detected refusing to enable local APIC", "ACPI: using PIC for interrupt routing".... i dunno if the last two message are relevant but they kept coming up and i finally just uninstalled acpi, acpid, and changed the lilo params to acpi=no. rebooted and voila.... APM was able to read the batteries..... been waiting so long for this to work so it made my day. To Mandrake developers: Is there anyway that you could have a choice between ACPI, APM during install...... I'm no expert so I'm not sure if you can perhaps have a dialog that will say... "Testing ACPI..." and have a battery meter there.... if the user sees the meter working then the dialog can prompt "Did the meter work? Yes, No?" Then it tests APM etc.... I don't mind having to do what I did with uninstalling and configuring lilo but this kind of stuff is not trivial to a beginner. Also.... I found that /usr/bin/apm was not setuid root so you couldn't suspend or standby. That might be an installation option that goes along with the ACPI/APM tests so that a new user is able to suspend and standby the machine. It's obvious to me what to do when KLaptop said "/usr/bin/apm is not setuid root.... " but again not very trivial... my friend who also has the 8100 has been waiting to get the battery meters working for a long time as well and when he couldn't suspend/standby the machine he didn't know what to do. he called me and asked what setuid is and what /usr/bin/apm is....... I can see him as a "new" user b/c all he's used before is windows so if possible i think mandrake would benefit from simplifying these procedures. thanx -- Adrian Rodriguez University of Southern California Computer Science http://www-scf.usc.edu/~sergior
