[ltp] QUESTION: HAL support for some T42 keys?

Guarded Identity linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:17:47 -0500


Excerpts from Henrique de Moraes Holschuh hmh-at-hmh.eng.br |Linux_Thinkpad|'s message of Tue Sep 22 22:28:51 -0500 2009:
>
> On Wed, 23 Sep 2009, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> >
> > What functionality are you looking for?  Broken volume response?  Reduced
> > lifetime on your LCD inverter and bad backlight control behaviour?

I want a callback for backlight keystrokes so I can persist the current value
to a file.  This is kind of inspired by a feature I saw in Windows where there
was different settings depending on whether the AC was plugged in or not.  It's
more about increased battery life than about inverter life.

I'm currently doing this callback with tpb.   One could probably argue that I
continue using tpb without messing with the hotkey settings at all.  But I was
hoping to have one daemon that ran outside of X to manage non-X related things.
This was going to be halevt.  The brightness setting persistence feature would
make sense for this daemon since it's not really related to X.

Then I was going to run another daemon as a child of X (kicked off by Xsession)
to manage very X-related things like

    - OSD
    - video toggling
    - screen blanking

tpb does this fine, but I was okay running another instance of halevt too.

> Hmm, sorry about the tone.  But it is a very sore point with me, that distros
> screwed this up and broke volume and backlight control for thousands of
> users, then added hack on top of hack to work around the breakage, breaking
> it for a different set of users.
>
> Do whatever you want to your system, there _are_ use cases when it makes
> sense to mess with those keys.  But they're not common, and I am yet to see
> anyone use them in a non-broken way.

Don't worry about the tone.  No harm done.  I'm happy to talk things through to
get your take on the issues.

-Sukant