[ltp] Laptop-Config in KDE 3.4 with T43 and Gentoo

[azazello]

> i am new in using Linux on my Thinkpad T43 2669 W64. Could anyone help me in 
> getting acpi,radon and suspend started. What packages do i need?
> 
> I want to have somethin to display my current cpufrq, battery lifetime and 
> temperature in kde.
> i emerged cpufreqd and configured it and emerged klaptopdaemon but dunno how 
> to start it.
klaptopdaemon should automagically appear in your systray as long as the
battery acpi option is checked in the kernel (i.e.
/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/* exists).

You'll want to "emerge acpid radeontool ethtool netplug pcmciautils
ksynaptics" in addition to other things (some of those require ~x86
keywords). Then you'll need to "rc-update add acpid default" and so on
for other services they install. If you have bluetooth, there is a suite
of KDE utils and the underlying stack to use that too.

Then you'll need to populate your /etc/acpi with event handlers and
scripts for them to call, gentoo still doesn't provide any of those. You
can find them online in various places. Mine are at

http://horizon.ath.cx/gentoo/etc-acpi.tar.bz2

(along with various other gentoo config notes in that directory)

You'll probably want to emerge hibernate-script even if you won't be
using suspend2 in the kernel since it provides a good script to
hibernate with. e.g. my sleep script is simply

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/hibernate --force --config-file=/etc/hibernate/sleep.conf
echo 'ondemand' > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Hibernating is harder, currently the best option is suspend2 which
requires a bit of configuration and custom kernel sources.

Since you have a T43, which might have a SATA-ATA bridge, you might have
a problem with that when sleeping/hibernating. Also, there's a kernel
patch for the kernel part of the open-source radeon driver to reduce
power consumption during sleep, I'm not sure if your radeon will need
it. Finally, here are some things I put into /etc/conf.d/local.start to
work around various configuration quirks:

echo 'ondemand' > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
echo enable > /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey
ethtool -s eth0 wol d
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 up; /sbin/ifconfig eth1 down

The first one sets up the correct cpu frequency governor (which can't be
set as default in the kernel config for a reason unknown to me), the
second enables the blue hotkeys in ibm-acpi (which are disabled by
default again for an unknown reason), the third disables WOL on the
ethernet adapter (which drains power during sleep), and the fourth power
cycles the wireless adapter (which on my system is initially on even
though the system has the interface down).

For radeon, you have the choice between closed-source and open-source
drivers, there are decent howtos online for both of those. You might
have to install xorg 7 to get open-source support for the radeon in the T43.

I don't know of any KDE system info display applets like what you want,
I'm sure there are some listed on kde-apps.org.

-ak