David Kanter wrote: > > I compiled a new kernel last night with APM support. When I boot up, I get > the message about APM BIOS. However, it doesn't work all that well. > <snip>
On my Hamm system, I had a hell of a time just getting my monitor to shut down let alone suspend the system or put it on standby. Basically what I discovered, in my case, is that using the BIOS timers is ineffective for everything but the drive spin down. For some reason the system overides them. I did find that if I set BIOS timers to a really low value, then they would work but having the system suspend after one or two minutes of idle time is not very practical. My primary goal was to spin down the drives and shutdown the video and I was able to accomplish that. I set the drive spin down timer in the BIOS and that seems to work OK. For the video power down at the console, I added a couple lines to my /etc/init.d/rcS file as follows: setterm -powersave on setterm -blank 15 For the video power down in X, I added a line to my ~/.xinitrc (for startx) and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/Xsetup (for xdm) as follows: xset dpms 900 If you have a DPMS compliant video card and monitor, the screensaver is somewhat reduntant since it is much better to power down the video in lieu of activating a screen saver. In that case, disable the screensaver using xset and/or setterm. There are some differences in the way Slink handles this stuff so take this with a grain of salt. My understanding of APM is that it is only beneficial for laptop applications. I can't say for sure, but I don't think it does much more than add battery support. Hope this helps.
