Power buttons

[jur]

How is it my EePC's power button doesn't work?

I have done a search and found some ACPI things which I still need to follow through; however my question is more fundamental than that. My EeePC 1000HE came with WinXP and the power button worked just fine. And the same is true for a large number of different make and vintage laptops at work. All power buttons work with Windows.

From this I would conclude that power buttons adhere to some sort of standard if they all work with Windows. So how come they don't work OOTB with linux? I have tried now so many flavors of linux and none of them worked.

Isn't this a standard thing that ought to be implemented in TC?

[Juanito]

I guess some power buttons work via bios and some work via acpi (perhaps using the "button" kernel module).

You could try using the acpid extension to see if the power button generates an acpi event, which could then be scripted to do whatever you wish when the button is pressed.

[curaga]

They work with Windows because the manufacturers all make them work, adding the drivers and configuration necessary in the preinstalled image.

Do you mean it won't work at all, or that there's no soft shutdown, only a hard one with a 5s-or-so press?

[jur]

No soft, only hard shutdown.

How would one go about writing a script? Unfortuantely I am still very dependent on others in linux; I did look at bigpcman's efforts with acpi but couldn't penetrate the discussion.

[curaga]

Acpid is what takes care of the soft shutdown.