Laptops :: Thinkpad Control .dsl extension

I've succeeded in building tpctl and its associated kernel modules and packaging it up as a .dsl extension.
tpctl is a Thinkpad configuration utility (and kernel modules) that gives you the same kind of control over a Thinkpad's hardware features that you would get from the Windows control panel utility that IBM provides. You can find lot's of information on tpctl (including the list of Thinkpads it is known to work with) on the tpctl homepage.

I'd like to know that this works on more than just my system before I submit it to the MyDSL repository. So if you'd like to give it a try, grab thinkpad.dsl (and the md5 if you wish) and report your results.

A couple notes on the extension:

1) It creates an "S50updatemodules" script in your /etc/rc5.d directory that will run right after DSL finishes loading all the extensions. That script does an "update-modules" to update the modules.conf file and module dependency info for any modules installed by this (and any other) DSL extension. If you load this as an "optional" module, you should (as root) do an "/etc/rc5.d/S50updatemodules start" before you try to insmod/modprobe the "thinkpad.o" module.

2) tpctl includes several kernel modules but you only need to insmod/modprobe "thinkpad.o". It will then automatically load the other modules as needed.

3) HTMLized man pages are installed at /opt/thinkpad

4) The "apmiser" daemon is of particular interest if you're running on battery. It uses tpctl to dynamically change the "performance level" based on CPU usage. I don't have a working battery at the moment so I can't say how much difference it makes, but it seems like a great idea.

If you try this out, please post success/failure reports here so I can get an idea how stable it is Good luck!

TP380XD
hmmm... not seeing that problem.
Seems fine, I have not actually been brave enough to
make any changes to bios settings, but I'm getting all
the information from it.
It took me a very long time to get the serial port to work
under Linux when I first got this machine, only succeeding
after getting a DOS copy of tpctl.... this SMAPI bios is a
strange and cryptic thing!
Wish I'd had this back then.
Will play some more after this initial report, cheers.