KjetilK's Journal: Please HELP: Getting APM working well :-)

Well, I guess this is a good place to ask for some help. I'm a Linux newbie (though I've been UNIX user for some years), I'm in it mostly for the freedom, and I'd like to understand what goes on under the hood. Sometimes, I get lost, however. So, if anybody has any advice, I would be happy.

This time, my problem has to do with APM. My mobo is a Asus A7M266, and I'm on Debian Woody (though I run things from unstable, to get KDE3), and I have 2.4.19 kernel running.

Once upon a time, APM worked beautifully on this box. I could do shutdown -h, and everything would halt. All fans would stop, monitor would go off, and the light indicating the machine is on would be turned off. When this worked, I was running a mix of Debian Potato and Progeny. Then I had to switch to RH7.2 for a while, but now I'm back to Woody, and I can't get it working.

I've enabled APM in my kernel, the config looks like this:

CONFIG_APM=y
# CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_USER_SUSPEND is not set
CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE=y
# CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE is not set
CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK=y
CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y
# CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS is not set
CONFIG_APM_REAL_MODE_POWER_OFF=y

Yeah, I've experimented with turning things on and off (right now, I have even ACPI on, but that's recent, I have had it off most of the time). In /etc/lilo.conf, I have
append="apm=power-off" and indeed, dmesg has some sensible things:
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=Linux ro root=301 apm=power-off
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16)

However, when I halt the machine, and it comes to "Power down" on the screen, I can hear some of the fans stopping, but the monitor is apparently not shut down (I guess that has something to do with DPMS and that it is really a different issue), some fans are still going and the light on the front of the chassis is not turned off, like it used to be.

I have little further information. I've tried a lot of searches, and I have also apmd running now. Any good ideas?

Update 2002-11-02: Last night I learnt that I need I2C enabled in the kernel for the sensors stuff. I figure I'll enable that the next time I'll compile the kernel, which I guess will be when 2.4.20 is released (it's rc1 now). Could that be it?

Update 2002-11-30: I got 2.4.20 in yesterday, and the I2C-stuff that seemed sensible. Still no change... :-(

Update 2003-07-29: Yeeehaaaa! Got it working. I grabbed the kernel config from Debian Woody, and started building on that instead of starting out with the config from Linus' tree.

That had in fact just CONFIG_APM=m enabled. Nothing else. That's it. Then, I added apm power_off=1 to /etc/modules. Poof! Shutdown works! :-) It seems to be as simple as that...