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 make it clear 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.

For those interested, the C source to those 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, but with the calls to the X input layer & dial support removed)

Having said this, you're correct that the standard utilities do exist
(even on my system - D'oh! for missing them) so that change is definite.

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

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 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-1.2 (not
yet uploaded) is the Bluetooth-fixed version, so your patches will move
us to 1.3.

I'd like to get just a little more testing done before pushing it out to
distros' for everyday use, because there's still a small issue I'm trying
to track down where some external process failing will silently kill
sonyxosd.  Having said that, 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


> Le lun 02/08/2004 à 21:35, Stuart Shelton a écrit :
> > 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!