Request for comments: Laptop improvements

[Jesse Barnes]

On Wednesday, June 14, 2006 10:24 am, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 06:13:12PM +0100, Dave Mitchell wrote:
>  > On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 05:59:59PM +0200, Phil Knirsch wrote:
>  > > Now, what i would like to ask of you is to give me some input on
>  > > what you think might be something where we could do better on
>  > > laptops.
>  >
>  > 1) Make the window manager cope with the loss/gain of an external
>  > monitor.
>
> AIUI, the problem here is that we have no way to know that has
> happened. We get no 'event' signal when things go away, and a vga
> cable is 'stateless'. so there's not even a way to poll the cable to
> see if anything is connected.

For most video devices, I don't think this is true anymore.  It should be 
possible to send connect/disconnect events via DBUS to HAL for most 
hardware given proper driver support.  I've heard that for some devices, 
polling may be required, but that shouldn't be much of a problem either 
since HAL already has polling support for CDROMs and such.

That said, I'm not sure if anyone is actively coding this stuff up...

Jesse