Unable to get APM working -- help!

[security at revolutionsp.com]

Hi list,

I simply can't get APM to work on this laptop.

It is a travelmate 4002WLMi (P-M 1.6) on which I've just installed FreeBSD
5.3-RELEASE, and built a custom kernel with apm, apm_saver and acpi (also
tried with only apm, apm+apm_saver, and now apm+apm_saver+acpi)

I had set the hints to disable ACPI and enable APM on /boot/device.hints
(don't know the exact names now and I've just shut the laptop down) - This
resulted in no /dev/apm and /dev/apmctl entries being created..

I tried changing the order of the statements (enable APM first then
disable ACPI).. to no avail

I also tried enabling both, which obviously didn't work quite well :-)

apm_enable="YES" and apmd_enable="YES"  on /etc/rc.conf
apm_load="YES" on /boot/loader.conf

Still, /dev/apm*'s never show up. Except if I actually disable APM and
enable ACPI instead, /dev/apm will show.. but no /dev/apmctl.

I'm new to the laptop world and I really would like to enable power saving
features on this laptop.. I managed to get est/estctrl running, and it was
changing my CPU from 600 to 1600 ghz according to the load, but when I
disabled APM and enabled ACPI this ceases to work and the CPU will always
run at  1600ghz. Also, acpiconf -i0 says device not configured..

As far as I was able to see, most battery monitoring stuff (integrated on
KDE and all) will depend on APM.. So I'd really like to enable it!

Am I missing some step to get APM working? Or does this laptop just plain
and simply doesn't support it ?
Please enlighten me.

Best regards,

Hugo