Laptops :: Getting ACPI to Work

After looking in these forums and using Google I believe I need the following after "append=" in syslinux.cfg to get ACPI working:

apm=off acpi=force

For good measure I also added noapm and deleted apm=power-off.

After boot lsmod did not show any ACPI modules loaded and /lib/modules/2.4.26/kernal/drivers did not contain /acpi - does anyone know if ACPI is supported by DSL? My Dell Latitude D400 is supposed to be ACPI compliant.

As an aside, I also saw that I should modify /etc/pcmcia/config.opts to remove port 0x800-0x8ff to avoid a freeze with APCI. I found I could not edit this file as root or with "/etc/init.d/mkwriteable" added to bootlocal.sh - is there some trick to this?

I did some playing around and found that DSL 2.0 RC1 appears to support ACPI (as opposed to DSL 1.5 in my case at least) although I had to manually load the ACPI modules - once done /proc/acpi contains various ACPI data and the Dock App wmacpi_1.99r7.dsl works fine.

DSL 2.0 appears to have ACPI modules for Asus and Toshiba but Dell owners (i.e. me) aren't so lucky...

In case anybody is interested, here's what worked for me booting from USB:

syslinux.cfg
DEFAULT linux24
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=off apci=force vga=normal initrd=minirt24.gz nomce noapm noapic quiet frugal restore=sda1 toram ssh nfs syslog lpd ftp mydsl=sda1 BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
TIMEOUT 300

root@box:~# modprobe battery
root@box:~# modprobe button
root@box:~# modprobe fan
root@box:~# modprobe processor
root@box:~# modprobe thermal
root@box:~# modprobe ac
root@box:~# lsmod
Module Size Used by Not tainted
ac 1824 0 (unused)
thermal 6724 0 (unused)
processor 9008 0 [thermal]
fan 1600 0 (unused)
button 2700 0 (unused)
battery 5952 0 (unused)
nls_cp437 4348 1 (autoclean)
blah...blah
ide-scsi 9040 0
root@box:~#

dsl@box:~> mydsl-load /mnt/sda1/optional/wmacpi_1.99f7.dsl
dsl@box:~> /usr/bin/wmacpi

original here.