[Techtalk] What I did over the Christmas Holidays!

Akkana akkana at shallowsky.com
Mon Dec 31 00:03:42 EST 2001


> > 6. What is the secret for having the PC shut itself off?  I know it?s
> > in the kernel configuration, but I just have never mastered the API
> > thingee.

jennyw writes:
> I haven't started using 2.4.x yet, so my advice might not be right on ...
> Check /etc/modules to see if APM is being loaded. If not, then you will
> probably want to add it.
> 
> I'm not sure if this applies to 2.4, but it worked for me in 2.2 when I ran
> into the same problem. Someone suggested I add the line
> 
>   append="apm=on"
> 
> to lilo.conf.  This worked just fine (once I realized that the line needs to
> be before the kernel descriptions instead of at the end of the file).

I haven't tried Jen's solution, so it might be just the ticket ... but
I've found that with Redhat (and Mandrake too, I think), the regular
distro kernels can't shut the computer down (the shutdown always gets
to "Stopping all md devices" and then something crashes and the system
doesn't power down as it should), but if I build my own kernel and
enable acpi, then magically the system can power off.  I haven't gotten
anything else in acpi to work (it's supposed to be able to monitor the
power switch and cpu temps and do sleep and suspend and all kinds of
great stuff ... eventually) but it does make poweroff work.

Anybody know what the "stopping all md devices" message comes from?
I looked through the scripts under init.d and rc.d but couldn't find
anything that printed that message.  I've wondered if poweroff might
work (without acpi) if I just disabled whatever is crashing doing that.

What I did over the Christmas holidays: nothing as cool as Jennifer
(though I did help my mom learn how to use the SuSE Linux Dave
and I gave her last christmas as a dual-boot), but fun anyway:
my husband and I (without prior coordination) bought each other the 
Agenda VR3, last year's Linux-based PDA.  Apparently the company is on
the rocks and they're going for $99 at Fry's.  No manual, and even online
the documentation is sketchy, but I joined the developer mailing list
and browsed agendawiki.com and I'm downloading a new kernel and root now.

The software is pretty rough and won't give Palm any competition 
"as is", but it's just the coolest to have something smaller than a Palm
where you can type things like "uname -a" into a bash prompt, or edit
files with vi. :-)  Looks like it'll be a very fun toy ...

	...Akkana



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