'Fn key' and ACPI on dell laptops

Alexander Volovics awol at home.nl
Tue Aug 19 14:22:41 UTC 2003


On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 10:02:49AM -0400, Michael K. Johnson wrote:
   
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 10:05:31AM +0200, Alexander Volovics wrote:
  
> > I had never thought about it, but you mean that to allow the bios setup
> > screens to come up during an X session something like 'suspend to memory'
> > had to be invoked first.
  
> No, I mean that when ACPI initializes, APM services are explicitly
> disabled.  Otherwise the machine would not comply with the ACPI
> standard.  You can't both have ACPI and APM suspend the machine.
> If ACPI is enabled, the button press MUST be processed by ACPI;
> it cannot be processed by APM, and if ACPI doesn't process it, it
> can't be processed.

Thanks for the explanation.
I had not known or realized that APM was involved when pressing
the 'Fn-setup' key combination to access the bios setup (when I was
running the machine under APM).
 
Alexander





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