ACPI problems with Mandrake 9

[CaptainIgnorant]

Ok, I'm brand new to linux so don't be too hard on me. I have a Sony P4 notebook with Mandrake 9.0. My BIOS does not support Advanced Power Management (APM) so I have to use ACPI--also this supposedly fixes IRQ problems for things like choppy sound. ACPI is experimental, though, so support is hard to find. This HOWTO was a little over my head, but I struggled through it.
ACPI HowTo (http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/acpi/acpi_howto.txt)

I thought I had successfully patched the kernel with ACPI. kernel recompile went smoothly and system has no problem booting. Used menuconfig to enable ACPI options.

Next I installed the lastest ACPID (daemon for ACPI) from sourceforge.

Now the system still boots fine, but during startup says something to the effect of
"ACPID failed. can't locate /proc/acpi/events --files do not exist"

From what I can gather, this is a list of events that causes ACPI to kick in and manage the power. the HowTo says this probably means I didn't menuConfig correctly, but I really don't know what else I could have done differently. Sure enough, though, the /proc/acpi folder does not exist.
(neither does /proc/sys/acpi which I think was the location in older versions of ACPID-and the one mentioned in the HowTO)

Can anyone help me, please? Sorry for the long post.

[CaptainIgnorant]

Well, I'm going to throw in the towel with Mandrake for now. I'm a full-time grad student (not in comp sci, unfortunately) and don't have any more time. I'll learn to do linuxfromscratch someday... but for now, SuSe 8.1 comes with ACPI so I'm going to give this a try. Thanks to anyone who gave my problem some thought.

[mdwatts]

Have a look through /var/log/messages to see if you can find other reasons for acpid failing to start.

Do you anything like noacpi in your bootloader config that could be preventing the acpi daemon from starting?

[binaryDigit]

if /proc/acpi does not exist then acpi is not running. which is why acpid won't work.
post the output of dmesg relevant to acpi.

[CaptainIgnorant]

Unfortunately, I have already downloaded SuSe and killed my Mandrake partitions (i know, I know, I'm a quitter--but at least it wasn't joyous like when I kill a microsoft partion).

mdwatts - I know that there was nothing in the lilo or grub (tried them both) configs that would have directly prevented ACPID from loading. And thank you for pointing out the /var/log/messages file. I didn't know it existed and I'm sure it will be a valuable resource as I troubleshoot this new installation.

binaryDigit - maybe I failed to enable a clutch setting when configuring the kernel? Kind of moot now, but I just installed SuSE and ACPI is "partially installed" according to the SuSE configuration for dummies program. It suggests I re-configure and recompile the kernel to fix this.
So, I may very well come up with a similiar problem with this distro. I will see if I can make some progress in the next few days.

Thank you both for the suggestions.

[deggs]

Captain,
Did you get ACPI working with SuSE?
If so, what were the steps?

[binaryDigit]

it looks like the acpi he was talking about was also a bit outdated.
here's the link to the acpi project page.
http://acpi.sourceforge.net/
there's some documentation on that site that is more up to date.

[CaptainIgnorant]

deggs - well, with the normal SuSE 8.1 install, I could get the thermal regulation and fan to work with ACPI, but not the battey/AC information. A SuSE help message suggested I try to re-configure the kernel with those options enabled and re-compile it. So, being the amateur that I am, I neglected to make a backup of my kernel image and destroyed my working one. If you are dedicated to SuSE, then your choices are:
1) use their acpi and re-configure, compile the kernel
2) download a vanilla kernel and apply the patch from the page that binary digit listed.

I would personally try to use the SuSE version if you can, as it has already been designed to work with that distro

As, for me, I went back to Mandrake when their 9.1 came with built in acpi, and it works perfectly except I still can't suspend to disk, and I have to disable apic (confusing similar acronyms) at boot to avoid IRQ problems.