Toshiba M35X-S329 Power Management Problem

[myNewHat]

Hardware:
Toshiba M35X-S329 Laptop
1.6Ghz CPU, 2Gb RAM, 80Gb Hard drive
Multi-booting WinXp, Xandros, and Fedora (7)

Problem:
Fedora does not recognize that the battery is full AND does not recognize the fact that the laptop is attached to the AC power. Therefore, Fedora shuts the PC down after just about 30 seconds or so. I have tried to change the power management options so that it won't do anything when it sees a 'critical' power situation. However, I am not fast enough to get the options to update before the computer shuts down. I was wondering if anyone might have some other suggestions for me on how to get the OS to NOT take any actions regardless of how low it perceives the battery to be?

I am posting this from my desktop computer that is running Fedora 7 just fine (dual-booting with Windows XP). I have decided that I like Fedora quite a bit (last time I used it was RH 4) and I would like to be able to use it on my laptop (with an eye to eventually getting rid of Xandros on my laptop). However, if I cannot fix the problem with the PC shutting down right away, then I'm stuck picking a different OS. I am not entirely sure that I actually get 30 seconds before the laptop shuts down because I have never timed it. I just know that it shuts down real fast.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for any suggestions you might have!

[myNewHat]

Just wanted to add that I am willing to try anything anyone suggests, including re-installing Fedora or even getting the source code in order to make a change there, if needed. So, it's not like I'm afraid to wipe out the current install and start over and I'm willing to get a little dirty to get Fedora working on my laptop. I've never worked with the code for an operating system before & so it'll certainly be a learning experience for me. I have a Bachelor's in Computer Information Systems & so I have done coding in C++, Java, and MS.NET. It's been a while since I work in telecom instead of IT, but I'm down for it if that's the only way. I already have Eclipse installed in Fedora on my desktop (that I am using to make these posts).

Thanks again for taking the time to read this and offer your suggestions! If you need any more information, please let me know and I'll get it as soon as I can.

[Dan]

Hmmm.

Toshiba, huh?

(Read: Shameless bump!)



Dan

[myNewHat]

Ok. Here's a little more information. I managed to get the power management tool to accept and store the change of instruction telling it to do nothing when it perceives a critical power situation. However, it still shuts down after 30 seconds. So, I re-installed Fedora and accessed the Fedora repository (http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Everything/i386/os/) and installed the ACPI and APM tools. However, the laptop still shuts down after 30 seconds, even when I tell it to take no action when the battery is critically low.

Additionally, when I try to boot the laptop when it is not connected to power, it gets to the point where it says "udev" or "starting udev" on the screen and, just as it goes to switch to the splash screen, it shuts down. So, if the laptop is not connected to AC, then it won't even boot up.

Not sure what the heck I can do about this situation. Anyone have *any* suggestions? I really would like to use Fedora on my laptop, but so far that is a no go. I decided that I prefer Fedora enough - and dislike Xandros enough now - that I would rather just suffer through having only Windows on my laptop if I can't get Fedora working. Today, I also tried Sabayon, SLED, and Debian on the laptop today. Debian wouldn't recognize my wireless card. Sabayon...Well, I just really dislike the package management system (primarily) and a few other things. SLED doesn't recognize whether my laptop is connected to battery or not and also does not allow write access to my NTFS volumes. I have previously tried Ubuntu, but it also is unable to control my battery.

So, I *think* I may have to recompile Fedora from source, but I am not sure. I would really love if someone could give me an opinion about this problem. If you have a laptop that Fedora works well on, please tell me about that, too.

My laptop specs again are:
Toshiba M35X-S329 Satellite
1.6Ghz Intel CPU
2.0 Gb DDR Ram
80Gb HDD
Intel PRO Wireless 2200 series

Thanks!
Clem

[Dan]

Well, Clem.

You've got me stumped! The War Department's HP ze4127 did something similar when I tried the F7LiveCD. It got far enough to pop a message up saying a critical temperature had been reached, and it was shutting down. I figured it was just a liveCD issue, so I rebooted back into FC6 ... and it did the same thing! Was still doing it on the third boot, and had me worried, until I booted back into an older FC6 kernel, and it came up fine. When I booted back into the newer FC6 kernel, it came up ok too.

So I counted myself lucky, and haven't poked an F7 disk into it since! If it was mine, I'd futz with it a bit more. But it's not, it's working now, and she can shoot a helluvalot better than I can duck! <..:p..>

However, if I come across an answer that doesn't get me killed, you'll be the third to know.


Dan

[myNewHat]

OK. I've been working on this a little more and would like some opinions. I found a line in /etc/inittab that *may* offer me some hope and I'd like to see what someone else thinks. Here's the line (and the remarks above it):

# When our UPS tells us power has failed, assume we have a few minutes
# of power left. Schedule a shutdown for 2 minutes from now.
# This does, of course, assume you have powerd installed and your
# UPS connected and working correctly.
pf:: powerfail:/sbin/shutdown -f -h +2 "Power Failure; System Shutting Down"
Edit: There is no space between the second colon and the p in powerfail, but I had to put it there because the forum was reading the two characters as this :p

What I was thinking is this: If I comment out the line starting with "pf::", then that may prevent the laptop from shutting down. I realize that this would prevent Fedora from managing *any kind* of critical power situation, but since Fedora can't manage a normal power situation then I figured that not managing critical power situations doesn't really matter. I don't run a UPS anyway and that, in the end, might be the spanner in the works here since, if you don't have a UPS, then there is no signal for Fedora to receive in order to manage the computer.

So, what do you think? If you think that this will probably not work, what other file(s) might I look in to see if there are commands for power management? I won't be able to try any of this out until the weekend (at the earliest) because I decided to re-install Windows on Saturday and Windows decided that it should delete my data partition. So, I have to get an external hard drive case in order to try to recover the deleted data. Once that either succeeds or fails, then I can try re-installing Fedora on the laptop. I also realize that I will have to put Xandros on the laptop because Fedora will not afford me enough time to edit the file. So, I'll have to do it from Xandros.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts!