Creating Laptop Profiles

[Bill Nottingham]

D Canfield (canfield at uindy.edu) said: 
> It may not be.  I've not yet learned enough about hal to have any clue 
> if that's something I have the skill to get involved in.  I've not yet 
> reconciled all the lists, but looking through thinkwiki.org, it looks 
> like some functions can be accessed via tpb, others via ibm_acpi, and 
> still others through yet another interface that just appeared recently.

Exactly. This is the main problem. Every different laptop mfr has
people creating X separate interfaces that only apply to that mfr.
Which makes a sane userspace impossible.

> If there's a clean way to handle this stuff in core, I'm happy to help.  
> But I just don't know where to find info on how to approach this.  All 
> the info I have on making buttons and special features work is via 
> thinkwiki.  If someone can tell me what info needs given to whom, I'll 
> do what I can.

Well, probably the best thing is to document what you did do, and
then we need people to start rolling this stuff up into generic
interfaces.

> The bit that took me the longest to figure out and that I'm not sure of 
> a general case solution to, is the docking station issue.  When I dock, 
> I have two monitors (or, I could just plug a second monitor into the 
> back).  What I'm doing now is using "MergedFB" and "MetaModes" to define 
> two modes: one has a 1400x1050 display on my laptop and a 1280x1024 
> display on my monitor, and the second is a virtual/panning 
> 1400x1050+1280x1024 non-rectangular desktop for when my monitor isn't 
> connected.  I then define one of the extra keys to run "xvidtune -next". 
> This is the simplest method I could come up with to replicate the hotkey 
> resizing that most laptops support under windows.  If there any approach 
> we could take to make this easier for users, or is this too much of a 
> corner case?

First, you need to get X supporting monitor hotplugging/changing. :)
(Yes, that's a large step.)

Bill