Linux users of Sony Z1 series

On Tuesday, 3rd August 2004, Jochen Michel wrote:

> Thank you for your work! Your programs work on my SuSE 9.1 box an a Z1 RMP.
> I've included an init script for SuSE 9.1 as attachment. I had to remove all
> if statements where you test for "sonypi" in uname, sonypi is compiled as
> module and works with your program (standard SuSE kernel, must be 2.6.5 
> after
> serveral online updates). These tests prevented your programs to start. I
> removed those statements from the init script and one from sonyscreen.

Great, thanks for that!

The sonypi code in the init script, by the way, was a workaround I put in for 
use with 2.4.x kernels:  There seems to be an issue with devfs, whereby 
frequent access to the sonypi device cause it to hang - and therefore any 
subsequent attempts to access any device under /dev to permanently block.  On 
2.4, I was finding that this was happening several times a day - so I put in 
this option.  Basically, you can specify in your bootloader to append 
"sonypi=on" to the kernel command-line.  Therefore, when I needed to do some 
work, I could boot without this option and have no danger of devfs killing 
the machine.

For anyone running without devfs, this won't be an issue so the code can 
safely be removed.
For those mad fools :) still using devfs, this is a hack that works.  Though 
there's unboubtably a much better way to do it that hasn't occurred to me 
yet...

I'll add the SuSE init script to my download area - your contribution is much 
appreciated.

> By the way, is it possible to make the xosd bar a bit more fancy? I'm afraid
> to say this but the bar looks a bit old fashioned. But anyhow the
> functionallity is there and that's what counts. :)

To be honest, I was more concentrating on getting the console mode to work - 
as I spend more time here than in X  (I always had a strange disposition away 
from GUIs of any form*...)  Having said this, the original idea was to make 
an X-only utility, so go figure.

One option would be to change the calls to X::Osd -> percentage to X::Osd -> 
slider which would give solid bars rather than the blocks used by default.  
And $osdcolour can be altered to whatever seems to fit.
I have a blue-ish background, so 'Orange' actually looks quite fetching...

Ultimately though, the X::Osd library provides text, percentage, and slider 
displays.  There two alternate solutions to a "fancier" display (which would 
be a nice feature to add) would be to find/write an improved OSD module, or 
to drop the OSD module entirely and simply paint custom graphics to the 
screen (in a similar way to gdesklets being, AFAIK, an xml-specified graphics 
placement tool).  Unfortunately, I'm not much of a graphics designer - but if 
anyone feels the urge to make things better then I fully encourage them to 
have a go, and will be on-hand if needed to offer what help I can.

If anyone has suggestions for alternatives to X::Osd, I'm all ears.

Cheers,

    Stuart

* Yet I really want a PowerMac - strange, huh?