fbdev+apm hangs & disabled serial on old thinkpads

this concerns an old thinkpad laptop, the 560e, running linux 2.4.20 & 21, but I guess there may be similar cases on other machines. the video card is a Trident TGUI 9660/968x/968x (rev d3) and the serial UART a typical 16550A.

the first problem is that with apm loaded all power features including shutdown work perfectly. with fbdev on, shutdown and suspend/standby features hang the machine. this is important since on that old machines using 'links' and 'mplayer' with fbdev support, make linux an ease to use.

q1: are there any details available for that kind of hangs?

the second problem is that /dev/tts/1 goes hardware disabled on some rare cases after a boot. resetting the bios and removing all power supply keeps the disabling on. On windows, device manager shows "code 22, device disabled" and turning it on from that OS, makes it work again running linux.

q2: since the disabling didn't happened using windows but that OS detected it, is there a similar way for linux, to enable devices?

-fsck