debxo 0.3 release

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2008, James Cameron wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 09:27:52PM -0800, david at lang.hm wrote:
>> On Mon, 3 Nov 2008, James Cameron wrote:
>>> The TODO file in the xodist git repository has a hardware enablement
>>> section that I added last week, which covers some of the things this
>>> thread has discussed.
>>
>> link to xodist please?
>
> xodist is the git repository name for the scripts that generate debxo
> images.

sorry, I missed that (and I even have that repository cloned, shame on me 
:-)

> git://lunge.mit.edu/git/xodist (per Andres' mail of 28th Oct)
> or
> http://dev.laptop.org/~quozl/xodist.git/ (my repo, sync'ed)
>
>> do you have the direction and rotate game keys working?
>
> I don't know.

they do not in the 0.3 build

>>> brightness control keys (conflicts with function key usage)
>>> volume control keys (conflicts with function key usage)
>>
>> these don't need system changes, just deciding which function those keys
>> should do, the brightness and volume functions are strictly in software
>> (and done via X hooks, as can be shown by the fact that these do not work
>> in a console, and in fact crash the system if you hit them there)
>
> Seems more logical to handle these keys in the kernel.

I don't think so. since the hardware produces the function keys, if the 
kernel does the functions instead of userspace, you loose the flexibility 
to use these as normal function keys.

the tendancy is to push more of this sort of thing to userspace anyway. 
the volume keys onthe thinkpads recently changed from being handled by the 
hardware to be intercepted by the kernel and treated as normal keys (with 
the default bindings being to control the volume) a few months ago this 
worked in Gnome, but not KDE, with the ubuntu release a few days ago it 
works in both (I don't use sound enough to have tried it outside of X)

>>> turn off backlight on suspend or hibernate
>>
>> I don't use suspend or hibernate enough to help, but now that we have the
>> script to control the backlight this should be fairly easy (although you
>> really want to turn off the entire screen, not just the backlight, at
>> least for hibernate, don't you?)
>
> If you're saying "the OLPC XO build also turns off the screen hardware",
> then the next question is "how?" ... presumably this can be found by
> examining it.

the thought just hit me that we don't always want to turn off the screen 
on suspend, unlike normal systems the XO is designed to be able to run the 
display when the main processor is suspended (although I remember being 
told that this isn't working due to software limitations today)

>>> The latter method is how xodist's initchroot.sh script does some
>>> features ... like setting up /etc/modules, xorg.conf, and so forth.
>>
>> I'm actually not happy with how the OLPC currently handles these things,
>> they are too X (and sugar) specific. we need to get a layer lower if we
>> can.
>
> Good.  But the general purpose solutions in Debian are perhaps too
> general for this situation.  Things like the discover package.

ideally I want to figure out how to get these keys into the kernel, at 
that point any userspace can deal with them.

David Lang