I'd still like to know why other than the hibernate I installed from the Debian etch/lenny repositories, my attempt to install anything that has to do with ACPI, seems to want to gut my current system, as can be seen below. Aptitude seems to want to satisfy dependencies by ripping out approximately the same set of programs every time I tried installing an ACPI-related program.

All the ACPI-related programs I've tried except the Debian repository version of hibernate, including a more current copy of hibernate, swsusp (suspends without requiring APM or ACPI support), uswsusp (userspace software suspend), athcool (power-off for Attlon CPUs), kpowersave, or even sleepd (a non-hibernate method for putting the computer into a sleep state) have the following results:

terrarium:/var/log# aptitude install sleepd
[snip]
The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
  arj comerr-dev gtkhtml3.8 hspell libacl1-dev 
libart-2.0-dev libarts1-dev libasound2-dev libaspell-dev 
libattr1-dev libaudio-dev libaudiofile-dev 
libavahi-client-dev libavahi-common-dev libavahi-core4 
libavahi-qt3-dev libavcodec0d libavformat0d libbrlapi1 
libbz2-dev libcamel1.2-8 libcupsys2-dev libdbus-1-dev 
libebook1.2-5 libecal1.2-6 libedata-cal1.2-5 
libedataserver1.2-7 libedataserverui1.2-6 
libegroupwise1.2-10 libesd0-dev  libexchange-storage1.2-1 
libfam-dev libflac++5 libflac7  libgail-gnome-module 
libgcrypt11-dev libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1  libgl1-mesa-dev
 libglu1-mesa-dev libgnutls-dev libgpg-error-dev libgpod0 
 libgtkhtml3.8-15 libgucharmap4 libidn11-dev 
libjack0.100.0-dev  libjasper-1.701-dev libjpeg62-dev 
libkadm55 libkexif1 libkrb5-dev liblcms1-dev libloudmouth1-0
 liblua50-dev liblualib50-dev libmad0-dev libmng-dev 
libnautilus-burn3 libogg-dev liboggflac3 libopencdk8-dev 
libopenexr-dev libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libpoppler0c2 
libpoppler0c2-glib   libpoppler0c2-qt libpopt-dev 
libpostproc0d libqt3-compat-headers   libqt3-headers 
libqt3-mt-dev libsasl2-dev libssl-dev libtasn1-3-dev  
 libtiff4-dev libtiffxx0c2 libtunepimp-bin libtunepimp3 libvorbis-dev  
 libxklavier10 libxml2-dev libxmu-dev 
libxmu-headers libxslt1-dev    libxt-dev lua50 
mesa-common-dev mkisofs qt3-dev-tools tetex-base   
tetex-bin

The following NEW packages will be installed:
  sleepd
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 93 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 18.3kB of archives. After unpacking 73.1MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.
terrarium:/var/log#

Since I didn't want my OS gutted, deciding that I didn't want to continue wasn't difficult. However, this may not be a problem for you, I've got a lot of things installed here starting with KDE that you might not. So if what I recommend here doesn't work, check into the alternatives I mentioned. The hibernate configuration files will probably have to be restored to defaults or otherwise modified to make them work.

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