Linux users of Sony Z1 series

[Stuart Shelton <>]

Top stuff - Great work Nicolas!

I develop primarily on Gentoo, which does have builds for these perl
modules (which is handy for packaging :) but as you've found fetching
them from cpan is not a problem.

Sorry if I didn't say it more clearly elsewhere, but the vtinfo and 
switchvt commands were little binaries I made to return VT number and 
switch the active VT since I couldn't find anything else to do this.  If 
there are existing alternatives, I'm more than happy for them to be used 
instead.

Having said this, I've just realised that you're correct that the standard 
utilities do exist (even on my system - D'oh! for missing them) so that 
change is definite.  Package "kbd", Gentoo-ers :)

For those interested, the C source to my binaries is available from
http://files.sony-tools.homeunix.net/utility/

(Whilst on the note of C source, owners of recent machines which are
JogDial-less may be interested in my version of the sonypid daemon -
identical to the standard, but with the calls to the X input layer & dial 
support removed)

Good work on collecting variables - I did do this before the 1st release,
but I guess a few got away from me...

I never managed to get hibernate to work safely on my machine - so I
didn't get around to adding it to sonyxosd.  My base version currently has
F7 switching the state of the backlight: I haven't tested switching VGA
outputs on my machine - so didn't include this feature either.  If these
do work then they're going in - so thanks for comfirming that too!

I've now altered it so that pressing F7 always toggles the backlight 
between on and off, but every time it is switched off, the VGA output also 
toggles.  To enable this functionality, set the $vgaout variable to 
"control" (default: "on" - I use both displays simultaneously)

I looks as if I modified sonyxosd to handle Bluetooth "properly"
(switching on the P1/P2 buttons, debounced, and correctly initialised at
startup) after you wrote your patch - so I'll integrate the two tonight.

In terms of versioning, I have it already (albeit, non-obviously):
All of the files you see under, for example,
http://files.sony-tools.homeunix.net/sony/ are symlinks to the _versions
subdirectory - which contains the different versions.  sonyxosd-1.1 is the
Bluetooth-fixed version, so your patches and my latest changes will move 
us to 1.2.

I'd like to get just a little more testing done before pushing it out to
distros' stable branches, because there's still a small issue I'm trying
to track down where some external process failing will silently kill
sonyxosd.  In addition, hitting a function key whilst starting X still 
results in blank rectangles once X has started - I can fix this by relying 
on VT numbers rather than filehandles on /dev/tty0, but given the number 
of code changes this requires, I'm going to do it another day...

Having said this, if the RPM is for testing/unstable/cooker/etc
then I think that's just the exposure needed to get as many people as
possible using sonyxosd :)

Many thanks,

        Stuart

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004, Brouard Nicolas wrote:
> Le lun 02/08/2004 ? 21:35, Stuart Shelton a ?crit :
> > There are several items that are needed for sonyoxsd to work:
> >
> > * The X11::Protocol, X::Osd, Term::ANSIColor and Term::Size Perl modules (see
> > cpan(1) if these are not available in your distro)
>
> On latest Mandrake 10.0 official these perl modules were not included in
> the packages, so I have had to download them with commands:
> cpan  X11::Protocol
> cpan  X::Osd
> cpan Term::ANSIColor
> cpan Term::Size
>
> but also
> cpan Term::ANSIScreen
>
> And for Osd I also needed
> libwosd2-devel to get the included files needed by the installation
> launched by cpan.
>
> On Mandrake, as probably on many other distros, 'vtinfo' doesn't exist
> and has to be replaced by 'fgconsole', also 'swtichvt' has to be
> replaced by 'chvt' .
>
> Could you check if, on your system, fgconsole and chvt do exist, because
> I think that they are more general (at least on google).
> fgconsole tells you on which terminal you typed the command (for example
> 7 on Mandrake if running on X). Doing a 'chvt 1' switches you to
> terminal 1 (do chvt 7 to go back to X window).
>
> So I slightly modified your perl script in order to have all these
> variables in the "variables" section and not hard coded later in the
> source code.
>
> I also added the hibernate (suspend to disk) on Fn F12 because it is
> working now on a recent cooker kernel.
>
> My most important change concerns "Fn F7" and now I have the circled
> sequences LCD -> LCD &CRT -> CRT . I am working with a replicator (and
> an external 20" Display) and often use a video projector for
> presentations, so I need this standard (at least on Windows) sequence
> (which was not set on sonypidd).
>
> Please find here after the diff with your original and here enclosed
> 'my' version. If you agree with the changes I can make a Mandrake/redhat
> rpm for your perl script like I did for sonypidd and submit it to
> Mandrake contrib. But you have to give a version number to your script
> because it will be probably improved in the future, at least when
> someone will find which bit has to be set in order to differentiate P1
> from P2.
>
> Just to say that I found this tool very useful. Bravo!