Not as easy as it seems....

GNU Power Management - I wanted to get it on my linux system so I could know how much battery life I had before I began my experiments, now my box is messed up once again. Hopefully I'll get it all back tommorrow. At least I have high resolution working since the patches didn't quite work. I kept getting broken packages which I suppose is not a good thing (but don't ask me how I got them). After discovering that G-P-M was only available in unstable (then I learned it wouldn't work with combo of stable/unstable). I still got broken packages, so then changed my sources.list to take only the unstable without the security stuff, it took forever and then machine hung. I rebooted then luckily figured out had to run dpkg --configure -a I think. Anyway, now I got unstable up and running the wireless doesn't work. I discovered the firmware appears to be missing (I'm not sure why probably the lib directory was removed and reinstalled I'm guessing) so I'll have to hook up to a cable to get it reinstalled. The battery monitor now appears but is not working it complains the acpi backend daemon is not running -- I don't know where to find the pieces and how it should be running and I still don't understand why this new hal backend shouldn't be running instead.

I guess when I figure it all out I should post what I find here but many of the hackers here probably know the answers. It just boggles my mind that software changes so fast that one has to search so hard or figure out the right combinations of things in order for them to work. I think as long as I get the wireless working back again and the software to run my experiments I'll forget the power management for now.