Frank Tanner III wrote:
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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.
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.
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".
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.
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Cheers John
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