On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, csieh wrote:

> RedHat disabled ACPI for laptops in Enterprise 3.  And so it is
> disabled in 30x.  It is/was too broken for RedHat to include.

I can report that IBM R40e laptops do at least boot-up successfully.

Knoppix, on the other hand, will hang completely on the R40e, at the
critical point during booting-up (needs power-cycling to recover),
unless the kernel option acpi=off is used.


One other point about the IBM R40e - if the SL installer is used in
the normal way, then it will be found completely unresponsive to the
keyboard and "mouse" (Trackpoint) when the first dialog appears.

(I see that I mentioned this to Connie and Troy, but haven't got it
onto the list archives, so here goes).

One solution that I found was to boot the installer with the "nousb"
option.  But I also found a web page:

  http://freedomink.org/node/view/105

reporting that "pressing a bunch of random keys during startup" will
avoid the problem - as indeed it does.  Not a very satisfying
workaround, though ;-)


See also the recent discussion about the SL kernel-unsupported module,
if one or other of your laptop built-in devices fails to work.  This
is needed e.g for the R40e audio.


A final remark that may be relevant to laptop users, although it can
also be useful at the desktop - I use a "6in1" USB-connected media
reader with the R-series laptop (compact flash, smart-media etc.).
For this to be used successfully, it's necessary to add to
/etc/modules.conf the line:

 options scsi_mod max_scsi_luns=4

- "for some convenient value of 4".  The multiple LUNs option is
enabled in the standard kernel, but it doesn't come into effect until
this parameter is set.  Allegedly, some devices can't handle the
situation, and so it's not set in the standard defaults, but I
had included this in our group-wide configuration for RH9, and have
had no problems with it, despite a fairly mixed bag of PCs.

When the 6in1 device is plugged-in, the hotplug routines actually
recognise one of the four devices (the memstick) and automatically
arrange a mount point for it in /etc/fstab.  I'd like to find out how
to extend this to the other three devices, but as yet I've not found
the spot.  I found several different places where hotplug
documentation said it would be, but it wasn't there...  Meantime
I'm handling the other devices manually, i.e by hand-configured
entries in fstab and associated mount points.

hope this helps