ACPI vs. APM IBM Tp 600E -- bat time

tuxp3 · n00b Joined: 28 May 2004 Posts: 61

alrighty, im doing a gentoo install on this puppy of a laptop, with its 300mhz proc, its not exacltly a huge heat generator, but it does have a nice quiet fan, as well as a (i just upgraded !!) 10 gb (4200rpm) laptop drive, and probably a wire(eventually going to be wireless) 10/100 pcmcia card, those are all the critical items that suck battery (besides the LCD) which i want to be able to limit consumption
and eliminate the problems i had using SuSe, it just would not do any type of APM for me, and i coudnt even get the ACPI module to load, plus i like gentoo better and would've ended up installing it eventually, i use it on my desktop and on a bunch of other computers.. just wanted to try a bin distro for once.....

Anyways
What i want to know is:
-Which power management choice is better, specifially with this laptop? latest bios revision...
-Which Power Management deamon provides the best battery life, or the configurablity to achieve longest life? basicly which is the best? or good choices that match up to the apm vs. acpi issue..

Also ive read many posts concerning sound and this laptop, so i will probably post here (more for FYI/records) of how i did it, but i havent gotten to that yet.. (im going alsa)

Thanks in advance for the pointers,

Tuxp3

petlab · Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 8:57 pm Post subject:

There is a confusion over APM / ACPI. I guess they cannot coexist, even tho it says so in (make menuconfig kernel config?) I turned on the acpi and apm in the kernel for my laptop. Then, I emerged apmd and added it to default. After that, I lost interest, mainly because it started working! The hard drive would spin down, and the display would blank. I even got it to hibernate.

The bad part was that I couldn't configure it. YMMV, I have a 1994 Panasonic Toughbook with a pentium 2 300mhz. I bet that it will work much better for you.

So AFAIK, you can only use one of the two, and I found that apm was at least WORKING.

HTH

iancognito85 · Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2005 4:35 pm Post subject:

tuxp3 i also have a thinkpad 600E... just for your info in case you need any help (or vica versa) just to let you know im there having difficulties too :lol:

(ive put posts up about the sound loads on this forum.. still havent got it sorted)

Anyways, im going to use APM... just finishing an install on this beast of a laptop... but as i said, the only problem im having is the sound.

cheers

offie

bgradid · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2005 Posts: 162

I was using APM for a good 4 months on this thinkpad 560z, but, a couple of days ago, I decieded to try ACPI again (it was pretty much unresponsive the first time around), and it magically worked. I've got a load more power savings, as well. my battery meter is often giving me a whole hour more than it was under APM. I havn't tested to see if this is true or not, but, when it's idle, it seems to conserve more power than APM. The only downside to switching to ACPI was that the function keys stopped working (i can live), and my USB mouse went all 'jerky', it seems the IRQ's are configured differently now, and there's a bit of a conflict going on now, but i'm trying to resolve it. My usb cd drive works great however, go figure.

So all in all, if you can do it, i'd recommend using ACPI, and if my 560z (pentium 2 300) can do it, i'm sure the 'step up' model, the tp 600, can do it as well.

(Kernel used: 2.6.12-ck2-r1 , ck-sources)

oh, and on a side note, my sound goes dead after a suspend, no rmmoding in the world seems to be able to redetect it, but it was the same under APM