Ikke's Blog

Some time ago my ACPI-driven laptop keyboard buttons (volume control, music player controls,...) stopped working. I'm using the acpi-support package (although not running a Debian derivate) driven by acpid.
Today I decided I wanted my buttons back, so I started to find out what was going wrong.

The issue: acpi_fakekey checks all /dev/input/eventX devices whether or not it's a keyboard device, and if it finds one, it writes the necessary scancode to this device. Since some recent kernel, /dev/input/event0 is no longer my AT keyboard, but one of these ACPI buttons, so writing scancodes to the device won't work: my X server keyboard driver won't see them.

/proc/bus/input/devices told me I need event4 (or use this command: hal-get-property --udi `hal-find-by-capability --capability input | grep KBD` --key input.device | sed "s:/dev/input/event::g"
). Patching acpi_fakekey.c is pretty trivial:

--- acpi-support-0.94/acpi_fakekey.c.orig       2007-04-28 18:09:37.078953488 +0200
+++ acpi-support-0.94/acpi_fakekey.c    2007-04-28 18:09:49.578470914 +0200
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
         char filename[32];
         char key_bitmask[(KEY_MAX + 7) / 8];
 
-        for (i=0; i<32; i++) {
+        for (i=4; i<32; i++) {
                 snprintf(filename,sizeof(filename), "/dev/input/event%d", i);
 
                 fd = open(filename, O_RDWR);

Replace the 4 with the correct number on your system.

Now my buttons "work" again. Patching acpi_fakekey so it uses HAL to figure out the correct device to write to might be somewhat more reasonable though :-)

Ikke • Linux, Desktop, Coding Corner 1 comment

Just had some discussion about OO concepts, abstract classes and interfaces in Java and Python in #gnome-nl. I still dislike the fact Python and other interpreted languages got no enforced interface implementation support.

A little comparison (not meant to be disrespectful againt anyone):
When you're living in a Java world, you can go out on friday night, meet some person implementing the Girl interface, invite her at your place and have some fun (you know ;-)).

When you're Python, you might go out on friday night, meet some person who tells you "it" implements the Girl interface and at a first sight does so, as get_voice_timbre returns "girl" and has_boobs returns true. Then you take the person home, to your bedroom, and find out, well, it's a shemale.

Got the picture? :-)

Anyway... SoC news will follow later on!

Ikke • Technology, Coding Corner 18 comments

A quote from the weblog of Bruno Segers, former topman at Microsoft Belgium:

Eerst en vooral laten we nu reacties toe. De vrees dat de bijna religieuze anti-Microsoft lobby mijn blog als hun ‘Uitlaat’ rubriek zou gebruiken is immers niet meer aanwezig. We blijven met Windows Live Spaces werken maar vanaf nu is commentaar mogelijk. Bruno goes open source !

In english:

First and foremost, we allow comments now. The fear an almost religious anti-Microsoft lobby will use my blog to show their dissatisfaction *(somewhat bad translation, I know)* is gone. We continue using Windows Live Spaces but from now on writing reactions is possible. Bruno goes open source !

So enabling comments in a blog is "going open source". Hmm... I'd figure people who used to be at top positions inside Microsoft would at least *know* what Free/Open Source is all about. Looks like I've been somewhat naive.

Via Kris.

Ikke • Life Leave a comment

Application deadline for Google's Summer of Code 2007 is already some time behind us. Might be interesting to provide a list of proposals I submitted, maybe some other people might pick up a project ;-)

I submitted 3 of them:
- GNOME: HID handling
Basicly, integration of XInputHotplug in the desktop, including per-device settings, and better Bluetooth mouse/keyboard handling (if possible without any command line magic etc.). Enhancing multimedia key support (especially ACPI-based) was a subproject too.
- Django: Row-level permissions
Title says it all. A pretty important project for the Django community.
- Gaim: Porting the Bonjour protocol module to Avahi, and enhance it's functionality
Bonjour-based IM (iChat) is pretty cool and should be (ab)used more. libhowl isn't so nice though as we got the Avahi guys providing us a completely free, glib-integrated mdns/dns-sd stack.

That's about it... I do hope at least one of them gets selected :-) All projects do deserve some love though, that's for sure.

Anyway, while waiting, I'm going to implement some little gimmick panel applet, more about that one later... Still doubting whether to take the Mono/C# or Python road.

Ikke • Technology, Desktop 2 comments