[ltp] Nearing nirvana with a T40P

[Neil Weisenfeld]

Well, stumbling onto the TPB thinkpad buttons program added another nice
feature to life under Linux w/ my T40P and the impending Atheros driver
makes life peachy.

I'm hoping that people can help with my two outstanding issues.

** one **

First off, there's the LCD backlight issue.  This is *not* the
suspend/resume problem as I have that DRI patch installed and it works
quite nicely.  Here's the issue: if *something* shuts off the LCD, then
when *something* brings it back on, just the backlight comes on, but the
display remains blank.  Things are fine when this happens with the stock
Linux console active (VESA? dunno), but with either X or the Radeon FB
active, life is bad.  If I don't use the RadeonFB, then I can
ctrl-alt-F1, Fn-F3, any key, and ctrl-alt-F7 to bring things back.  If I
use radeonfb, then I'm out of luck.  

Since the backlight has a limited lifetime, I'd like to be able to have
it shut down during periods of inactivity.  This works, with the "switch
to VT" hack, but is more cumbersome than I'd like.  Does anyone have a
lead as to what causes this?  I noticed that radeonfb has Powerbook
specific backlight control code and I've played a bit with this, but
don't think that it solves the problem.

Another related issue here is that I need to switch to a VT before
suspending or hibernating.  The APM script feature does *not* do it for
me.  I still have to manually switch, and then upon resume the apm
script feature will switch back.  But, if I rely on the apmscript
feature to 'chvt 1', it doesn't work.  I've tried moving the 'chvt' and
adding a sleep to apmscript, but it hasn't helped.

Anyone have leads on this LCD shutdown issue?  I'm happy to try hacking
code, but I don't even know where to start.  I'm running stock XFree86
4.3 under Redhat9 with the radeon DRI resume stuff patched in.  Even the
"latest CVS" version of those patches don't help here.


** two **

Speedstep.  No matter what BIOS settings I play with, if the system
boots on battery, then CPU frequency is limited to 600Mhz, even if AC is
restored.  I'm running the cpufreq module, however it still considers
600MHz to be the upper limit.  It used to be that the 600MHz limit went
in to effect, even if I booted on AC and then switched to battery,
however a recent change to kernel 2.4.21-rc8-ac1 seems to have made it
that it sticks with whatever it had at boot time.



Any suggestions would be appreciated.  I'm anxiously awaiting the
Atheros drivers.  Personally, I'm not psyched about having Fn-F5 turn on
the radio as that turns on Bluetooth, too.  I think that the radio
should just be on when the driver is loaded (or the interface brought
up).  But anything is better than having to have my PCMCIA card sticking
out the side.


Best regards to all on this list!


Neil