[ltp] T20 - to acpi or to apm?

[Michael Perry]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 12:48:08PM +1300, Nick Rout wrote:
> I have a T20, nice solid machine, a little long in the tooth, but it gets me by.
> 
> I had reason to completely reinstall gentoo on it recently, and now have a recent 2.6.9 kernel with acpi enabled and acpi-ibm installed.
> 
> I haven't managed to get suspending and hibernation working properly yet, but i am beginning to wonder if I should be using acpi at all, or whether on such an old machine I should stick to apm.
> 
> One of the reasons for saying that is that the fan never seems to go very hard, the machine gets very hot. The fan goes full tilt when i turn it on from a cold start, but as soon as the kernel boots it seems to slow down.
> 
> So, do the wise people here recommend I go with acpi or revert to apm. I can get a later kernel - 2.6.10 is easy to switch to in gentoo, there may even be 2.6.11 available?
> 
> And any hints on the fan speed? I'd rather too fast than too slow, as I'd rather be annoyed by the noise than fry the insides.
> -- 

Hi Nick-

I don't have a T20, but I've had some adventures on a T23.  I could not
get apm to work at all on a T23 with the latest bios from ibm.
Everytime, it would get failed interrupts and a kernel panic.  That's
when I decided to go with acpi and after a few starts and gasps because
of issues with various kernels, acpi started working pretty well.  I
would take a look at the latest bios revision for the T20 and also get a
kernel going that is 2.6.10 and see how it is.  Just a note though on my
own experiences on 2.6.10 with apm on a dell inspiron though.  I had
terrible problems with that combination and after perusing the dell
laptop yahoo egroup's messages, it seems others did too.  A few the
problems were:

-spurious lockups 
-mouse not working on resume
-terrible clock drift
-kernel panics

My advice FWIW.  Give a 2.6.10 a try with acpi.  I had to backlevel the
kernel back to 2.6.9 on my dell because 2.6.10 was really flaky for me
with apm and its hardware, bios, etc.

I don't have hints on the fans since my t23 seems to handle things
really well now.  I've posted a few times on my kernel configs, some
scripts I've written, and some successes and failures.  Perhaps you can
take them all and make some use of them on the T23.  

I would definitely look into the bundled ibm-acpi stuff because it makes
things very nice for me now and its in the 2.6.10 kernel sources.

BTW, I run debian unstable with stock kernel.org kernels here.


-- 
Michael Perry | do or do not. There is no try. -Master Yoda
mperry@lnxpowered.org | http://www.lnxpowered.org