[Laptopkernel-devel] Introduction and general thoughts

[Stephan Skrodzki]

Dear Bernd, dear Hanno,

first let me thank you to your work and you Bernd for your website about
Linux on the TM 80x.

I have some remarks on the project you started:

a) I would suggest to change name and mission of the project. The reason
is, that although you aim it to be useful for generic laptops, i would
wonder if it is very useful - at least in this form of distribution,
which I would discuss in b) - for other users than those of the Acer
TM80x series. Of course, the radeon fb module doesn't hurt, if you have
a Dell L600, but it doesn't give you any help with the Nvidia FB.. Other
centrinos have other NICs, CardBus driver etc. etc. So, my proposal
would be to call the project "linuxontm800" or so, and to not only
provide the kernel patches, but also links or archives of the tools to
use those patches (e.g. software suspend). I'd love to have a mailing
list with people only talking about Linux on the TM800, as I have many
open questions but also my own first experiences.

b) For trancsparency and individuality please do not provide a mega
patch but - if possible - a collection of single patches and a shell
script, which would apply them... e.g. provide a tar.gz with all patches
in on dir named 01_acpi.diff up to ..99_usb_storage.diff or something
like that (the beginning numbers are for applying patches in the right
order...) and provide a simple shell script like:

for i in *.diff ; do (cd /usr/src/linux ; patch -p1 $pwd/$i ) ; done

or so. If you need me really to write the script, ask again, and I could
do that, youst provide me the patches in the above mentioned form.



So, I hope you would think about my proposal, I think this would help us
all on getting Linux to work on the TM80x as fast as possible.

Now, to some of my experiences:

ACPI: the battery does not give you a discharge rate, so most of the
tools show no or senseless rest times. Do you have the same results?

IRDA: I have tried all hints of Werner Heusers IRDA Howto, also no
result. I once got the NSC-Ircc module loaded, but an irattach irda0
broke it with the following:

messages.0:May 21 12:11:24 localhost kernel: nsc-ircc, driver loaded
(Dag Brattli)
messages.0:May 21 12:11:24 localhost kernel: nsc-ircc, Found dongle: HP
HSDL-1100/HSDL-2100
messages.0:May 21 12:11:35 localhost kernel: nsc-ircc, unable to
allocate irq=0

do you have better results?

Hotkeys: I have tried all the patches and modules for other acer models
on the web. No one worked...

Modem: no success yet. Forgot what I have tried... but also many
patches...

Xfree: works fine, except, that the power save function (backlit of the
screen) does not work. This is the saddest for me, as I love to let my
box running all day long...

Standby, Suspend... nothing does not work. Bernd, pleas could you
describe more precise how to get softsuspend running? The hibernate
script just hangs here.

Ah, things I plan:

write a wrapper around the kernel messages of the bcm module, so that
dhclient is only started, when the network is up. 

http://freshmeat.net/projects/eheatload/?topic_id=143%2C862%2C952

looks fine as a x based apci++ application. As I am a fvwm2 user, I
can't take those nifty kde or gnome docks...

Best regards
 Stephan