Adding DELL brightness support to HAL

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2006-07-15 at 10:18 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 15:16 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > As discussed in https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7221 I've
> > attached a patch that creates the correct device and matches up the
> > properties on any Dell Laptop (we could blacklist/whitelist specific
> > devices that do not work, but I'm assured this should work on nearly all
> > Dell laptops).
> 
> Okay to commit?

So I was talking to a guy from Dell here at OLS about getting some of
this code from Dell into the HAL tree.

For example this patch just doesn't provide a good user experience
insofar that you need the dellLcdBrightness binary (so you need a
package few distros ship) and that reads your BIOS password from
somewhere since, ugh, setting the LCD brightness on at least some Dell
laptops require the BIOS password (so you need to configure this).

I'd much rather see 

 1. the Dell code integrated into HAL

 2. we can make SetLCDBrightness() et. al. throw a new exception
    PasswordRequired

 3. g-p-m can then ask the user for the BIOS password (and use e.g.
    gnome-keyring to store it)

 4. g-p-m calls new function SetBIOSPassword() (or whatever) on the
    LCD interface

 5. from now on SetLCDBrightness() works

or something. We want a vendor invariant interface too.

Let's wait and see. OK?

Cheers,
David