I did a clean install of mandrake 9.2 powerpack on my Dell Latitude C640 laptop (1.8 Ghz pentium IV, 512 Mb memory).
It works fine, except whenever I plug/unplug the power, the machine hangs (with 100% reliability). It completely freezes (no respond, no ctrl+alt+backspace, no ctrl+alt+delete, no ctrl+alt+F1-F5), and the only way out is pressing the powerdown button for a couple of seconds and rebooting. Not exactly what was expected.

I did not have this problem with Mandrake 9.1 / 9.2RC2 (yes, I did a complete clean reinstall, formatting the partitions, etc, over three times, nothing wrong with the memory or other hardware. My windows partition is just fine and dandy). Anyone know if this is a kernel problem, or did I forget to install something?

Thanks for any suggestions! I am about to download another distro.

The first thing that popped into my mind was "Speed Step", it's used on certain mobile CPU, to reduce the battery cunsumption when on battery.
Try this,
Reboot the PC, press F2 at the DELL logo, and go to page (6 or 7) using ALT-P, there (some where) you should see a line that says SpeedStep ENABLED, disable it andthen boot under linux and try.
If all workes then I would advise to download the latest BIOS from the Dell website, and/or recompile the kernel, to reflect your processor or how should it work.

Cheers
Ginux

I disabled all power management features in the Bios, and it still hangs.
I am sure the problem is related to the powermanagement, so I will try to upgrade the Bios and see what happens.

There was something on the mandrake site about related problems with some HP laptops, inclduing the fix for it (passing nolapic to the kernel at boot). I tried this, but it does not solve my problem.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

That was a shot....

Listen does it happen under a terminal (not X)? i.e. if you boot in init 3?

Yes it does. Even in failsafe mode (only command line) it freezes completely when I unplug the power.

It was working whith a previous release.... The only major change other than the small pakages should be the kernel.
Have you tried to recompile the kernel?
What kernel rev. are you currently using?

It is kernel version 2.4.22 that is used in mandrake 9.2
I have not tried to recompile the kernel, but I am installing everything again right now (just to make sure nothing is broken in the file system because of all of the sudden freezes).
Compiling the kernel will be the next thing I'll try (never did it before, first time for everything). Or maybe I could see if I can get an answer from Mandrake directly.

Thanks. I have solved the problem.

You were right. It was the Intel Speedstep. Just taking the power saving features offline was not enough. Somewhere further down in the Bios I found a setting to turn Intel Speedstep off, and after that it works like a dream!

Do you think kernel developers need to know this? Or can it be a Mandrake specific problem?

OK, I have filed the bug with the kernel development team at Mandrake.
It does not seem to be reported before, so we might have solved a premium here.
Thanks again!

Hey good news
I'm happy for you

Happy to have helped (even a little bit )

Cheers
Ginux

This was happening to me with my inspiron 8000.
Since the power saving feature is actually nice to have with a laptop you have other options:

I found this link
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linu...1-41/0120.html
that explains which features to turn off when compiling the kernel.
(which is pretty easy but does take a first-timer a few hours)


The lazy way:

The other option is to use the kernel from 9.1...
just get the package from one of the ftp mirrors and install it.
(ftp://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/dist...-1mdk.i586.rpm for instance)

When you boot the machine pick the old linux kernel in lilo.
Once your sure everything is good. You can remove the kernel package for 9.2.

This might not be a good idea as it seems to have messed up power management in other ways...
can't get the status of the battery.

I built the kernel source from the package kernel-source-2.4.22-21mdk.i586.rpm (the most recent) and everything works well now...
1. Install the package from an update sight.
2. Using the directions at http://www.aerospacesoftware.com/ker...ile-howto.html get to the xconfig window for /usr/src/linux-2.4.22-21mdk/.
3. Under the "Processor type and features" button make "Local APIC support on uniprocessor" = no.
** You should also pick your processor type while your here.
4. Under the "General Setup"->"PCI Hotplug Support" buttons choose "IBM PCI Hotplug driver" = no .
** Unresolved symbol errors will occur during linking in the "make modules_install" phase if this is not done (if you don't know what I'm talking about, just do it).
5. Continue with the directions from the above link.

This worked for me so I assume it will work for you.

You can bypass steps 3,4 by using the .config file at http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kswenson/kern...mdk-i8k.config

** You still have to run "make xconfig" and then save as you quit out of it.

I did this and am very pleased my comp no longer locks when the lid is closed or the power cord is unplugged.

Problem: I tried to install acpi and acpid, and they don't seem to load at startup. No errors are shown, it acts as though they don't exist even though the files are in rc.5
Can acpi be run?