iB::Topic::Thinkpad Control .dsl extension

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Topic: Thinkpad Control .dsl extension, Ready for beta testing

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kopsis

Group: Members
Posts: 65
Joined: July 2005

Posted: July 22 2005,03:52

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!

SaidinUnleashed Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 1428
Joined: Mar. 2004

Posted: July 22 2005,04:38

Does this have the mwave modem driver?

If it does, and it works, I will love you forever!

Also, I'll help host it, since the DSL crowd will quickly kill your bandwidth.

http://luna.vectori.net/~anorion/dsl/thinkpad.dsl
http://luna.vectori.net/~anorion/dsl/thinkpad.dsl.md5.txt

-J.P.

--------------
They say if you play a Microsoft CD backwards, you hear satanic messages. That's nothing, cause if you play it forwards, it installs Windows.

Unleash the power of the TILDE~~~

libretto

Group: Members
Posts: 336
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: July 22 2005,08:47

Hello,

Tried installing it on my IBM TP 240.

Loaded the .dsl via CLI 'mydsl-load'.

"tpctl --help" lists the options

But if I try and run something such as "tpctl --ib" it returns:

"tpctl: System error message is: No such device
tpctl: CAn't open device file /dev/thinkpad/thinkpad with flags O_RDONLY. Exiting."

Will have a further read of the manual.

--------------
Small Radio, Small Laptop, DSL Linux

adraker

Group: Members
Posts: 229
Joined: Feb. 2004

Posted: July 22 2005,09:13

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.

kopsis

Group: Members
Posts: 65
Joined: July 2005

Posted: July 22 2005,14:22

Saidin:

It doesn't have the mwave driver because I thought that was already in the distro. I guess I need to take another look. If it's not there, I'll take a shot at building the driver and adding to this extension.

libretto:

The device files are installed with root access only. Try adding prefixing your tpctl commands with "sudo" and see if that fixes it. If so, you can "sudo chmod 666 /dev/thinkpad/thinkpad" to allow the dsl user access.

adraker:

Note that tpctl writes to hardware registers directly ... it does not change any of the BIOS non-volatile settings. The upside of that is if you screw something up, reboot and you're back to normal. The downside is that any settings you want to retain you'll need to explicitly set on every boot (add tpctl commands to bootlocal.sh).

14 replies since July 22 2005,03:52

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