1. APMD is a set of programs for controlling the Advanced Power Management daemon and utilities found in most modern laptop computers. APMD can watch your notebook's battery and warnusers when the battery is low. APMD is also capable of shutting down the PCMCIA sockets before a suspend. Install the apmd package if you need to control the APM system on your laptop. From Mandrake 9.0 RPM

2. Utilities for Advanced Power Management (APM) On laptop computers, the Advanced Power Management (APM) support provides access to battery status information and may help you to conserve battery power, depending on your laptop and the APM implementation. The apmd program also lets you run arbitrary programs when APM events happen (for example, you can eject PCMCIA devices when you suspend, or change hard drive timeouts when you connect the battery). This package contains apmd(8), a daemon for logging and acting on APM events; and apm(1), a client that prints the information in /proc/apm in a readable format. apmd is notified of APM events by the APM driver in the kernel. Recent Debian kernels are built with APM support but it is disabled by default. You need to boot the kernel with the "apm=on" option if you want to enable the driver. (You may need to add this option to your lilo command line.) From Debian 3.0r0 APT