laptop-devel Digest, Vol 2, Issue 2

Neil Hooey nhooey at gmail.com
Tue Mar 14 16:15:22 GMT 2006


On 3/11/06, Ian Soutar <soutar at uvic.ca> wrote:
> A quick intro ... I am a robotics lab instructor at the University of
> Victoria. It has occured to me that a program to interface to ACPI
> should work by requesting the user to press several special purpose keys
> until the program recognizes the laptop. If it does then ACPI software
> can be installed.

And rather than having the user do this every time, we could just get
testing users to do this once, and send us their dmidecode data so we
can identify the system, and have some sort of list of modules that
need to be loaded for specific laptops. This is analogous to assigning
keycodes with the hotkey-setup package.

> My laptop is an Acer Aspire 3000 and I just got the ACPI working by
> building a custom DSDT.asl file.
>
> I build and design firmware industrial products so I am familiar with
> building in custom interfacing that makes an attempt to deduce the
> protocol. At the very least, laptop analysing programs should ask you to
> do various things like close the lid, press the power button. press the
> sleep button etc. Then it can write its own code to detect these things.
> Thus (except for ACPI stuff) as least the basic functions will work.

What do you mean by "decuc[ing] the protocol" exactly? Please
elaborate on how you propose it be done.

> Since I am new to the group ... is this the direction that things are going?

We've really only just started working on this project. Would you like
to write a small program that could detect what kind of ACPI/APM
events the laptop sends?

I haven't worked with ACPI stuff before, so I don't know much about it.

Oh and just a note, please rememeber to trim stuff out of your replies
and change the subject from "laptop-devel Digest...".

Welcome to the list Ian,

- Neil



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