Only turn laptop off manually?

[pmrphs2002]

Hey all,

Posted this earlier, but somehow overwrote my previous subject with an exclamation point...ill never get used to this touchpad...


This is an interesting problem:

Mandrake 9.2, Dell Inspiron 2650

When I shut the computer down via the KMenu, it goes through the whole routine of unmounting, unconnecting, and turning things off.....then forgets to turn the computer off!

Nothing from the command line works....same ending.

The computer is "off" just- not. The power on light is on, and you can hear the fan.

What gives?

[quip]

Does it say "power down" on the screen?

[saithan]

I would guess that your laptop has a apci power managment bios, while most (guessing) rpm distros defualt their kernels for apm bios.

on all my redhat boxes I have to recompile the kernel for acpi support (which I also do for the smp and hyperthreading).

afterwards, with the acpi support compiled into the kernel the machines will auto turn the power off after the shutdown command is issued.

[cybertron]

I have also had the same problem on a 2650 with Mandy. A couple of things that I tried that seem to have helped (it's working for the moment anyway):

1) Update the BIOS. Chances are this will break something and you'll have to fix it (I don't have much confidence in the Dell 2650 BIOSes because they shipped mine with one that froze the computer every half an hour), but it's the one I've got right now and it works after some tweaking.

2) Play with the append section of your lilo.conf (or the Grub equivalent). I'm in Windows right now, so I can't look up mine, but try acpi=off and noapic. I'll post the relevant sections of mine when I get back to Linux (the sooner the better :)).

3) Make sure that the screen setting in your BIOS isn't set to simul mode. I don't remember exactly what the name of the setting is, but it will say either LCD, CRT, or SIMUL. You want LCD. Don't ask me why, but my laptop won't shut down when it's trying to send the video signal to the LCD and the external monitor port if there isn't an external monitor connected.

4) If none of that works, search the forums for "shutdown power off". There's a number of other people who have had the same problems.

[dboyer]

my fix for this was (as root):

modprobe apm

but i was running slackware (similiar laptop though).

[terpic]

This may be irrelevant but I had a similar problem with a desktop, the solution was to uninstall the k-smp4g kernel and install the standard k-defit kernel it's worked fine since.

[pmrphs2002]

Whats upsetting though is that Drake 9.1 worked fine.

Has MandrakeSoft changed what power management system they used between releases?