APM Question

[John Summerfied]

Frank Tanner III wrote:

> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> The idea is that the laptop will be mounted in the trunk.  There will be no

I had to think there. It's the boot here.

> physical access to the buttons.
> 
> ACPI is what I meant.  Sorry about that.  I have looked at the Power
> Management applet, and nothing.  It has settings for buttons and what to do
> on battery power loss, but nothing about loss of "AC" power.  The idea is
> that the laptop powers itself down gracefully when the "AC" power is lost as
> I turn the car off.

Turning it off is trivial. There's a field under /proc you can poll and 
when you see it's running on BATT you can shut it down.

A shell script run via cron will do nicely. You might even wait for BATT 
to go below some predetermined value, maybe 50% or 10% charge. Probably 
you don't want the thing rebooting when someone stalls the vehicle.

> 
> There are third party utilities for Windows that take advantage of the UPS
> service to manage a graceful shutdown of a laptop on loss of "AC".
> 
How do they turn the thing on? Desktops have a setting in the BIOS but I 
don't recall  such a thing on the laptop's BIOS.

You might be able to rig a cable (think camera release) to push the 
button on some stimulus - a button push or an electronic sensor that 
detects 13.8V from your car's electrics.

-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at computerdatasafe.com.au  Z1aaaaaaa at computerdatasafe.com.au
Tourist pics http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu/