Hello there, I have some good news: in my pain and desperation I installed the newest kernel from the apt-repository (kernel-of-the-day), a 2.6.8-0-default -- and now I can close and open the lid without having dead X! That's wonderful, but it does not solve any of my SpeedStep problems. Maybe it is of use for you, that I have not changed anything else in the system configuration beside the 100% throttling in YAST and the acpi=off and apm=on in the grub.conf... When the system goes down for reboot or halt, it says ACPI module unloading, which is funny, as I told it not to use them, anyway... Or am I misunderstanding something here? I have downloaded the latest kernel from kernel.org (2.6.10), too, but I have the feeling, that this is not really a kernel issue. Please don't think I'm lazy and let you do all the work! I've spent hours on that already! Hope I will get answers, und natuerlich sind mir deutsche Anworten genauso recht!! Yours, Daniel Daniel Mader wrote:

Hello all and Merry Christmas!

I am playing around with a relatively old (3-4 years?) notebook from Dell. It's not very up2date but would be all I need. Unfortunately some things do not work, most of which are due to the powermanagement.

BIOS version is A22, which is almost the most recent one, the newest has some improvements for BIOS passwds which I don't need and does not seem to fix anything else. I'm running SuSE 9.1 Pro on it, with recent package versions thanks to apt4rpm and a kernel 2.6.5-7.111.19-default.

My problems: - closing the lid turns of the screen and won't bring it back to life, no matter what I set in the BIOS (SUSPEND or ACTIVE). If a shell was open I can savely init 6 the computer so the system is not dead... Besides that suspending works beautifully, even the FN-Suspend key stroke works lika a charm! Clock is not screwed up, sound works, nics still configured, everything fine with that, and: it's very very fast (5secs to sleep in and wake up, each).

- I watch the CPU frequency with osdcat and had to learn that there is no SpeedStep scaling happening. Depending on powermanagement settings in the BIOS (performance, powersafe, disabled) the speed is fixed to either 700 or 850MHz, and the only dynamic I can see is, that when I suspend it with AC and wake it up without, the speed is 700 instead of the 850 and vice versa...

I can not use ACPI because the system simply won't boot with it...

What can I do to make things better? Is that a known issue? There's hardly any information about recent distros/kernels on this thing out there, most of the people describe it with RedHat 7.0 and didn't care about battery life and powermanagement, it seems... I know it's an old system, but it seems to be of good quality, it was free :) and I want to give this thing to my girlfriend, therefore it has to run perfectly well! Also, it has 512MB RAM and with 20GB harddisk it is fairly recent technology - not counting the fact that it's no Pentium M.

Thank you very much for any help and suggestions!

Yours Daniel

Some output: dionysos:~ # powersave -c Speed stepping is not supported.

dionysos:~ # cat /proc/cpufreq minimum CPU frequency - maximum CPU frequency - policy (apparently the system does not know anything about available freqs...?!)

dionysos:~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 8 model name : Pentium III (Coppermine) stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 701.645 cache size : 256 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov patpse36 mmx fxsr sse bogomips : 1388.54

dionysos:~ # lspci 0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03) 0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 03) 0000:00:03.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420 0000:00:03.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1420 0000:00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02) 0000:00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01) 0000:00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01) 0000:00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 03) 0000:00:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1983S Maestro-3i PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 10) 0000:00:10.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c556 Hurricane CardBus (rev 10) 0000:00:10.1 Communication controller: 3Com Corporation Mini PCI 56k Winmodem (rev 10) 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility M3 AGP 2x (rev 02)

dionysos:~ # cat /boot/grub/menu.lst # Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Tue Nov 16 22:04:38 2004

color white/blue black/light-gray default 0 timeout 8 gfxmenu (hd0,1)/boot/message

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux### title Linux kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 vga=0x314 splash=verbose desktop resume=/dev/hda1 showopts acpi=off apm=on initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe### title Failsafe kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3 initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd

title Memory test kernel (hd0,1)/boot/memtest.bin