Bob Proulx wrote:
> James Robertson wrote:
>
>> I have a Lenovo Thinkpad R61.
>>
>
> I have a T42. It is similar. But it is also slightly different. Let
> me give a warning that you may find that my instructions here are
> slightly different than what you need. But I think they will be
> pretty close.
>
>
>> I'm running Debian Lenny with a minimal install of XFCE and selected
>> "laptop" at the tasksel option in the installer and nothing else
>> (installed xorg, xfce, etc afterward).
>>
>
> Sounds good.
>
>
>> The Brightness and Volume/Mute keys do not work and I have researched
>> how to get them operating but the options I have found all offer
>> slightly different ways to do it. Hibernate, Thinkpad light works ok.
>>
>
> Do you have 'tpb' (ThinkPad Buttons) installed?
>
> apt-cache show tpb
>
> I think that this is what you are looking for. It both enables the
> function of the special keys and uses the on screen display (through
> libxosd2) to display the action. For me this was the secret sauce to
> make things work nicely.
>
> The installation of the package installs a script in
> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90tpb that will automatically start the tpb
> process when you log into the X11 graphics session. But when you
> install it while running X11 then it won't get a chance to start yet
> because you already started it. Plus you need to be in the nvram
> group at that time too so that the program can access the nvram
> controls. These two things mean that typically you will need to log
> out and then log back in again as part of the installation process.
>
> Here is the process (I think, this is from my memory and I may have
> missed a step):
>
> 1. sudo apt-get install tpb
> 2. Read the /usr/share/doc/tpb/README.Debian, it is short, and
> understand the issues it describes concerning the nvram group.
> 3. editor /etc/default/tpb
> ... START_TPB="true" ...
> ... This may have already been presented as a debconf question
> at installation time. But it seems like I always miss it. ...
> ... This will start tpb automatically when next you log in. ...
> 4. id | grep nvram
> ... no output means no nvram group listed ...
> ... observe that you need to be added to the nvram group ...
> 5. sudo addgroup $(whoami) nvram
> ... nvram group will now be there upon the next login ...
> 6. Log out.
> 7. Log in.
> 8. id | grep nvram
> ... observe that you are now in the nvram group ...
> 9. ps -ef | grep tpb
> ... observe "/usr/bin/tpb -d" running ...
> 10. Test the buttons. Enjoy!
>
> If you decide you wanted to undo all of this completely then the
> following steps remove it and purge the configuration files from their
> locations in /etc/. (Purging the /etc/ configuration of packages
> means that if you install it again that it will install into a fresh,
> pristine and unedited state. Otherwise the configuration files would
> remain behind from the previous installation and would still contain
> their previous settings. Sometimes you want one and sometimes you
> want the other.)
>
> 1. sudo delgroup $(whoami) nvram
> 2. sudo apt-get remove --purge tpb
> 3. Log out.
> 4. Log in.
>
> Additionally I set "MIXER on" in my ~/.tpbrc file. This allowed me to
> intersperse changing the volume with the buttons and changing the
> volume with other programs such as the gnome panel volume control or
> the standalone 'aumix' and 'alsamixer' programs. You may or may not
> want that too. Try it first without it and try mixing up the control
> and see if you need it before enabling this configuration.
>
>
>> In Xubuntu 8.10 the keys all work without any post install config
>> needed. Does anyone know what packages/config that Ubuntu uses to
>> achieve this? I have booted the Xubuntu Live CD and looked around but
>> cannot figure it out.
>>
>
> Ubuntu has put a lot of effort into making the installer do a lot of
> these types of things automatically. This is good for casual desktop
> users because most of the time it works the way they want it to work
> without extra steps. But sometimes this type of automatic decision
> making also gets in the way. Sometimes it guesses too agressively.
> Then people need to take action to remove and deconfigure things.
>
> Sometimes the code to do this gets to be a burden upon the maintainers
> because it can basically turn into a huge lookup table of systems and
> types. As years go buy it can become a burden on the maintainers to
> keep the understanding of how the hacks works when making additional
> hacks.
>
> Having the maintainers gather experience with both ways of creating
> system installers is a good thing in the long run and will produce a
> better installer over time. But for the moment there are some things
> that need to be helped out after install for particular special pieces
> of hardware. The ThinkPad buttons is one of those that is special and
> different from say the Toshiba buttons or other models.
>
> Here are some good resources for ThinkPads. Note that you probably
> should read articles for the entire T-series in addition to your T61.
>
> http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Thinkpad
>
> http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Debian_Lenny_on_a_ThinkPad_T61
>
> http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T_Series
>
> Hope this helps,
> Bob
>
> P.S. Note that in Sarge and Etch the kernel module 'ibm-acpi' was
> needed to be loaded, usually by addition to /etc/modules. But in
> Lenny's Linux kernel this was renamed to 'thinkpad-acpi' and is now
> automaticaly loaded in Lenny therefore nothing manual needs to be done.
>
Thanks Bob,
I tried tpb but found it slow to alter the brightness and since I'm
trying to go minimal I continued to look for solutions that didn't need
any further packages installed. From various things I found tpb was
mentioned as being and older way of doing it.
I ended up rewriting the following scripts to get it working. The
package hotkey-setup was installed.
root@griffin:~# cat /etc/acpi/thinkpad-brightness-up.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo $[`cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video1/brightness`+2]
>/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video1/brightness
# END
root@griffin:~# cat /etc/acpi/thinkpad-brightness-down.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo $[`cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video1/brightness`-2]
>/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video1/brightness
#END
You could also use /sys/class/backlight/thinkpad_screen/brightness
instead of /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video1/brightness but I reinstalled
Lenny and cannot remember how I ended up getting
/sys/class/backlight/thinkpad_screen/brightness to show up (probably
missing some package) but the "acpi_video1" option worked so I wasn't to
bothered.
This works on my R61 so I don't know how it will go on other models.
Now for volume/mute keys
Thanks again for your help.
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