Ok, after a month of hunting, I finally got hibernation to work. (see here) However, I still get nothing when I press my power button or close the lid. KPowersave has them set to power off and hibernate, but it doesn't do anything. I've tried editing the various /etc/acpi/actions files with no results. Near as I can tell, the events aren't even firing.

Drakxservices says both acpi and acpid are running and set to load on boot.

I just want to be able to close the lid and have it lock and hibernate. How do I get it to actually detect the lid close?

No one even seems to be reading this thread... Someone, anyone, please, please, throw me a bone here.

Here's my progress on this idiocy thus far:

I'm not exaggerating things here. NO acpi events are firing. I can press the power button, shut the lid, etc, and still get no events:

I've found that adding "acpi=ht" to my kernel line in GRUB's menu.lst adds some funcionality. The power button now does an immediate power kill, which is actually worse than before. It's supposed to shutdown, not die outright. If I need a forced power off, holding the button has always worked fine. I'll stick to "log out", "turn off computer". It has always worked fine. (and yes, it turns it off by itself after shutting down) Only other changes are the removal of "Suspend to RAM" from KPowersave's menu (not that it works, anyway) and it now turns the screen off on lid close. Attempting other things like "acpi=on", "nolapic", and "noapic" do nothing.

I've found this page, saying that the events aren't detected for this model, though it's quite an old page, and I don't really know what it's about.

I know the lid button works on this machine; I've been shutting the lid to hibernate in Windows for years. This is an extremely basic function, and I'm getting quite annoyed that I can't get this to work. Can someone please at least try to help?

I've got this fixed and working via help from the official forum, so I'm posting the result here solely for the reference of anyone else reading this.

http://www.jlab.org/~moffit/computer/inspiron5100.html

Upon adding the very obscure widget acpi_irq_balance to my kernel line in grub's config, things just magically work now.

Oh, some 60 to 70 people have taken a look at the post, but no one knew an answer. Remember, we are mere mortals and do not know everything.

Anyway, glad that you could solve it and that you have posted the solution for others. I will mark this topic as [solved].