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(?) Soyo Shutdown

From Tongke Xue

Answered By Jim Dennis, Karl-Heinz Herrmann, Heather Stern, Matthias Posseldt, Mike Orr

(?) Greetings!

You're the "Answer Guy" from LinuxDocs righ? (if not, forgive me and trash this email).

(!) [Mike] Just to clarify. Jim is the original Answer Guy, and used to write a column by that name in Linux Gazette (LG). LG is copied into the Linux Documentation Project and thus exists on all the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) mirrors.
(!) [JimD]
http://www.linuxdoc.org
(!) [Mike] Several months ago, we converted The Answer Guy to The Answer Gang, and the column is now called The Answer Gang. The Answer Gang also produces LG's Mailbag and 2-Cent Tips columns.
(!) [JimD]
while I'm mostly lurking and lounging on a beach in the Bahamas -- the virtual Bahamas, of course.
... So, guess you've found the droids you were looking for.

(?) Is there a way to have Linux automatically power off my machine ... I recently discovered that while my machine was off if I double clicked the mouse, (any where) the machine would automatically boot ... I'm using the Soyo Dragon+ motherboard.

(!) [K.-H.] Yes. You need apm support in your kernel. In 2.2.x times there were not too many options so it worked or not depending on your BIOS. Since 2.4.late (like 16) there are lots of apm options to make it work on various boards and BIOS versions.
(!) [Matthias] That's no Linux problem at all. Your Linux system shuts down the machine and powers it off, the same way as Windows does, right? And you can go away for 2 hours, and no fan spins and no harddrive nor video card is active. But you double click with your mouse and the computer boots. That's a BIOS feature. Power On on Mouse event, or something like that. You have to disable it in the BIOS -> Power Management menu.
The ATX boards have this option, they are not completely off if powered down, so they can use features like Power on on mouse click or power on on keyboard event or Wake-On-LAN. Maybe your PC has a power switch on the back, near the power cord. It completely powers off the PC (same as if you would pull the plug ...)
(!) [Heather] There was however a recent tidbit on debian-laptops, that some APM will not work - and therefore not properly turn off the machine even after shutdown - with APIC support turned on. This makes sense as that's some nice features from the SMP world for uniprocessors (if I understood the kernel source help notes; y'all are free to correct me). This seriously affects laptop users, who don't want a reboot sequence to pause and waste extra juice if they had to change kernel options.
Many laptops no longer properly support APM, since they don't bother to even try debugging that it works (since the Borg from Redmond have very nice ACPI support)... and I would not be terribly surprised if some desktop motherboards are the same. Reports are that ACPI for Linux is actually usable for menial day to day use like turning the whole box off properly, and suspend/resume to some mild degree of usability. But a lot of work still needs to be done for drivers to support different sleep levels.

(?) Specifically, I'm wondering if there is some package that I can install so that when I do `shutdown -h now` the machine could just turn it self off.

(!) [Matthias] Dive into the BIOS options ;-)
(!) [K.-H.] You could simply try:
"halt -p" or "poweroff" instead of the shutdown command. That will call shutdown anyway. Works on my laptop (kernel 2.2.18 and 2.4.4, 2.4.16 tested).
(!) [JimD]
This information is spot on. As I said, the Answer Gang (including Karl) answers most of the questions these days.
BTW: many kernels kill not support APM (soft power switch for desktop systems) under an SMP (symmetrical multi-processor) kernel. I've heard that there are inherent race conditions, design flaws in the APM spec, that makes most APM functions dangerous in an SMP environment. Newer kernels seem to have an option to allow limited APM functionality (specific soft power switch control) even on SMP desktops. Read the kernel configuration help pages (make menuconfig, select "Help" from the dialog) and the kernel docs (under /usr/src/linux/Documentation) and maybe search Google! (http://www.google.com/linux ) for details.

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Published in issue 76 of Linux Gazette March 2002
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