LCD brightness capability question

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 12:59 +0200, Jan Jockusch wrote:
> Hello Richard,
> 
> > Depends what they emit from the kernel. My toshiba had to have a special
> >
> >hal addon written for the special toshiba smbios interface, but most
> >stuff works out of the box.
> >  
> >
> I'm afraid a similar add-on is also necessary for fujitsu tablets. There 
> are several people who have dealt with the issue. The most interesting 
> description of a similar hardware setup comes from
> 
> http://apanel.sourceforge.net/tech.php
> 
> There, the apanel developer describes how to identify the SMBus address 
> of the button devices. I still have no idea if I have the same hardware, 
> but I'd still like to skim my BIOS for the strings pointed out in that 
> article.
> 
> But: how do I read my BIOS? Any idea on where to find it, e.g. its 
> offset in /dev/mem? If you know anything about spying out a BIOS, that 
> would help me a lot.

Hmm, not my area of expertise, sorry.

> >Exactly what buttons need supporting? Do you get events for them using
> >"lshal -m" ?
> >  
> >
> The Stylistic tablets have ten buttons plus a detector for "docked" and 
> a detector for "vertical/horizontal orientation" (because the dock can 
> swivel the tablet to an upright position). Presumably, the SMBus device 
> also has interrupt capability. The buttons are: up, down, page-up, 
> page-down, Fn, Enter, Esc, Orient, Mail, Alt). I suppose these can be 
> mapped arbitrarily.
> 
> lshal -m doesn't reveal anything. (xev doesn't, either, of course).
> 
> A kernel module exists for a similar Tablet, but that module doesn't 
> work for me. I contacted the author for hints, but got no answer yet. 
> Maybe you're interested to look at
> 
> http://jan.rychter.com/software/fjbtndrv/fjbtndrv.ucw

I think that's your best bet, something kernel side.

> I'd like to have a look at the toshiba smbios code, too. Can you give me 
> a pointer? With that and the BIOS information, maybe I can work out a 
> precise specification.

What I meant with smbios (maybe I used the wrong terminology) is that
the bios of the toshiba provides a weird file in /proc/acpi/toshiba that
you have to read and write to, which is different from an ev or acpi
event.

I think you need that kernel module to abstract things out a bit.

Richard.