EVO N610c: power management (Linux)

[Stephan Merz]

I have installed Mandrake 9.0 on an EVO N610c (kernel 2.4.19, XFree 4.2.1) and everything looks fine, except that APM doesn't work (I am running apmd, and /proc/apm looks fine):
- When trying to suspend, the screen goes dark, the power LED flashes, but the battery doesn't seem to last noticeably longer than when I just leave the power on.
- In console mode, the keyboard doesn't respond correctly on resume (can usually be fixed by switching consoles).
- Under X, the machine locks up completely most of the time, even when I force it to switch to the console before the suspend. If I don't switch to the console, the screen actually brightens instead of darkening...

Any ideas? Btw, the documentation says that the BIOS settings for power management have to be changed using Windows utilities; however, my sysadmin won't let me have both Windows and Linux on the machine. Are there any Linux tools to configure these parameters?

Thanks a lot,
Stephan

[Georg Luebeck · Accepted solution]

Stephan,
I've experienced similar problems with RH7.3 XFree 4.2. However, I've managed to get fairly consistent suspend/resume functionality using Carl Botha radeon driver - found under http://cpbotha.net/dri_resume.html
There is plenty of useful information about these issues on his web page. For me this solved the backlighting problem and prevents X from freezing up after resume. For working off power, you may also consider downloading the mouse_uf utility (link to source at
http://www.brokedown.net/~squash2/n600c.html)

You may find it also necessary to disable 3D acceleration to get resume to work (i.e. make sure you are not loading DRI).

Hope that helps.

Georg