APM Question

[Frank Tanner III]

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of John Summerfied
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2005 9:36 PM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases
Subject: Re: APM Question

Frank Tanner III wrote:
> I am in the process of setting a laptop computer up to be installed in my
> car.  Of course, it is running Fedora Core.  Why I chose a laptop is
> outlined below.
> 
First, you don't want APM (and it may not even exist in new laptops), 
you want its replacement, ACPI:-)
>  
> 
> Here is my question.  I have a car "AC" adapter for it.  Obviously, I also
> have a battery.  I know, in Windows, that there is a way to get a laptop
to
> safely shut down and turn off on the loss of power on the AC connection.
It
> is able to do this because of the battery.  Is there a way to do this in
> Fedora Core?  I didn't see any settings for "shut down on AC loss".  Also,
> secondary and less importantly, is there a way to get it to turn back on
> when "AC" power is restored?

My laptop's down on the farm (and I'm not) so I can't check its 
settings. However, this stuff is configurable in KDE and probably Gnome. 
Take a look at the PM applets.

On my laptop, I have to press the power button. It's not different for 
XP Prof which is also installed.

btw My tosh has three buttons which can turn it on. Two of them are 
special-function keys that can be used at any time, and they stay 
latched until read. I could easily run a script during boot to perform 
some special action if either has been pressed - eg to choose between 
runlevels 3 and 5, to start home processes or work ones.

Conceivably, I could hack on grub and use them to choose between 
Windows, Linux and the menu based on which key I used to turn the 
machine on.

------------------------------

The idea is that the laptop will be mounted in the trunk.  There will be no
physical access to the buttons.

ACPI is what I meant.  Sorry about that.  I have looked at the Power
Management applet, and nothing.  It has settings for buttons and what to do
on battery power loss, but nothing about loss of "AC" power.  The idea is
that the laptop powers itself down gracefully when the "AC" power is lost as
I turn the car off.

There are third party utilities for Windows that take advantage of the UPS
service to manage a graceful shutdown of a laptop on loss of "AC".