Linux, laptops, and acpi

[Vadatajs]

I've read that if acpi isn't properly configured, you can do damage to your laptop. What kind of damage can happen?

Somebody has written instructions for installing linux on my particular laptop ( here ), but the acpi section leaves a little to be desired.

 

[Nothinman]

I would assume just whatever damage can come from overheating, laptops would seem to be more sensitive to that since everything it crammed so tightly together.

 

[manly]

From what I've seen, ACPI on Linux is still very much a work in progress. I had to look into it because ACPI isn't just power management that's very useful for portables, but also handles PCI peripherals configuration.

Two other Linux distros that also have merged ACPI into the 2.4 kernel are SuSE Linux (since 8.1) and Mandrake (since 9.1). Red Hat reportedly had ACPI backported in their previous 9.0 beta cycle, but did not feel it was production-quality.

If you want the newest ACPI code, you'll probably have to merge it yourself; I don't know how feasible that is. In my case, enabling ACPI in the kernel does not work so well for my nForce2 system. Instead of completely disabling it, I've disabled just the PCI routing feature.

Unfortunately for me, I still haven't been able to get my Orinoco Gold PC Card wireless client (running off a PCI CardBus controller) working. I suspect it has something to do with ACPI, but turning it on and off has no meaningful effect. No luck with either SuSE 8.1/8.2 or Mandrake 9.1. The PCMCIA subsystem appears to load properly, and the orinoco_cs driver loads but it doesn't successfully speak to the card.

FWIW, there are many reports on the SuSE mailing list recommending turning off ACPI for desktop systems because it opens up more peripherals configuration problems than it fixes.

I'm not sure how ACPI could damage a laptop; offhand I believe the main consequences of no ACPI support are shorter battery life between charges and inability to suspend the system.

 

[Soybomb]

Like manly I can't see how not having acpi enabled could damage a laptop in anyway. The one thing that I am familiar with though is if you try to use something like lm-sensors to get temperatures some boards don't care for that and will die.

A quick read on that issue: http://www2.lm-sensors.nu/~lm78/cvs/lm_sensors2/README.thinkpad

 

[Vadatajs]

So what I'm seeing is that installing linux on my laptop really shouldn't damage it. I'm a bit hesitant to try again, because last time I tried a knoppix hard drive install, and my laptop died the same day. It wouldn't boot most of the time and when it did it would only run for a few minutes before the screen wigged out and the machine would lock up. 3 weeks, a new mobo, cpu, and screen later I want to make sure that I really did have defective hardware (even though it ran for a good 7 months without a problem), and that my linux experiment didn't lead to the destruction of my lappy.

 

[Soybomb]

I think your problem was just a coincidence. If you're truly concerned I would be sure not to use lm-sensors, and perhaps even just avoid any kernel with i2c support.

What model laptop do you have? Try hitting google, I'll be you'll find a ton of people using linux on it successfully and perhaps some words of wisdom on it as well.