[ltp] Fglrx 8.28.8 promises Fn-F7 toggling. Anyone got it working?

[TNKS]

Hi,

I sent the following ticket to ATI.  I don't know how quickly they'll reply,
or how helpful their customer support is typically (especially regarding
Linux support). So I thought I'd also post to this mailing list, because
this community is pretty active and knowledgeable.


<<<< cut and paste from my ATI ticket >>>>

The release notes of the latest fglrx driver (8.28.8) say that it is
supposed to support Fn-F7 video toggling on IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads. Is this
supposed to work out of the box? I'm thinking there's some configuration
that's involved. I have a Thinkpad T42 with a Mobility Radeon 9600.

I actually have a script on my system that emulates the Fn-F7 video
toggling, but I'd much rather have native support. Let me explain a little
about it, because some of the software interfaces it uses might be relevant
to getting fglrx working properly.

There's a kernel module called ibm_acpi that offers two things of interest
here. Firstly, it provides a method to capture Fn-F7 key strokes and
generate ACPI events. That's how my scripting works. I have the acpid
daemon run my script after capturing the event. My script does all it's
emulation through aticonfig --query-monitor and --enable-monitor.

The second feature ibm_acpi provides is a "video" interface that on the
surface looks like it offers a way to enable/disable the LVDS or CRT, and
even a way to to cycle through video modes. However, it doesn't work on my
system (evidently it's not necessarily supposed to according to the table
on http://ibm-acpi.sourceforge.net/). 

Does the fglrx driver only support Fn-F7 video toggling if it's supported by
ibm_acpi?

fglrx /does/ provide scripts that end up in /etc/acpi. The scripts that are
there toggle power management upon receiving lid and power-plug ACPI
events. This is where I installed my script to receive Fn-F7 ACPI events.
But I don't see anything similar provided by ATI.

One final note, for ibm_acpi to send Fn-F7 ACPI events, I think it steals
the key-press from other subsystems. I can mask/unmask hotkey handling by
ibm_acpi, but that didn't make a difference; all it did was disable/enable
the my own Fn-F7-handling script (because the ACPI event wasn't generated).
By the way, I just put in an "exit 0" command in my script to make it bail
out pre-maturely while testing out if fglrx could support Fn-F7 video
toggling.

Thanks for your help,
Sukant