Keymap for Dell Latitude D630

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi All!

Sorry for the late reply -- had to bot another operating system first to
gather some needed informations to answer this mail.

On 10.07.2007 19:14, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-07-10 at 18:06 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
>> On Tue, 2007-07-10 at 19:02 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>>> Note that the "Wifi Catcher (DELL Specific)" stuff for my dell D630
>>> should (at least according to some webpages) be present in some other
>>> recent latitudes (D420, D620, D820) as well. 
>> What should userspace do with this event? What can we sensibly make the
>> button do?
> Either it's handled in hardware and does nothing (it will go
> blink-tastic if you have a wifi network in range), or it gives you some
> key presses, as some Latitude quirks already show [...]

Yeah, according to
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/solutions/en/wireless_popups?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz&~lt=popup&~section=004
there is a small LED that should blink if there are networks reachable.
Seems it should work even when Laptop is powered down.

But withing Windows a "Choose a WLAN to connect to" app comes up if you
press the "Wifi-Catcher". So if we want to have a similar behavior then
we likely should open the "Choose you WLAN" from NetworkManager.

But well, it's not that important, so we can likely ignore it for now.


BTW, I wondered about two other things while thinking about the whole
stuff a bit more:

* while testing this I noticed there is an Wifi-LED in that notebooks
that's within windows is glowing if Wifi is enabled by the kill-switch;
it's never glowing within Linux -- is that something hal and userspace
should care about as well or should this be something the kernel should
handle on its own?

* Is there any distinction in hal between events that are handled by
hardware and those that need to be handled my software? E.g. I submitted
my keymaps for my D630 including those for brightness adjustment. But
the hardware handles those fine already (well, it stopps to work after
ACPI-S3, but that's a different topic). So if some random userspace app
 would starts to interpret these events in the future then both hard-
and software would adjust the brightness when I hit the keys. That is
likely not what we want afaics.

It's afaics even more bad for sound; some notebooks (some Thinkpad like
the T41 and the T60  for example and *IIRC*) have special buttons to
adjust the sounds level. Those buttons send a key events and regulate a
hardware mixer as well. This can lead to situations like this:

- user joe starts windows and lowers the sound level to the minimum, so
the hardware mixer is down
- joe starts linux; it restores the software settings for the sound
driver which is "maximum output on all outputs" (IOW al alsamixer bar
are full open)
- joe plays a sound with aplay; he notices that there is no output and
pressed the "volume up" key. Some gnome magic recognizes that via the
keyevent and the "volume popup" shows up.
- joe looks at the popup and sees "mixer is full up already" and stops
hitting the key
- joe is confused why there is no sound
- joe after a minute or two tries to hit the "volume up" key again; now
the hardware mixer is slowly tuning up and then finally there is a sound
output

CU
thl