ubuntu-eee-coders team mailing list archive

[Sitsofe Wheeler <262679@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alessandro Ghersi:
Last year patches were integrated into the mainline kernel that sent additional hotkeys via the input layer (using the eeepc-laptop module) rather than as ACPI events for the EeePCs that were out of the time (you can see this in Bug #232170 and this was mentioned by Olivier). At that point, my EeePC 900's hotkeys for wireless toggling, brightness and volume all worked without additional scripts as the hotkey events were being sent a standardised way and GNOME was configured to respond to them out of the box. For "standard" hotkeys it is better for events to be sent directly via the input layer rather than as ACPI events (which may in turn need redirecting to input events or special dedicated scripts) as it gives a more consistent experience with less quirks.

There are some features that eeepc-acpi-scripts does (such as switching
between the slow and fast modes (using SHE) depending on whether you are
on battery or not) which will never be added out-of-the-box. An
additional function of these scripts appears to be to work around bugs
in a particular wireless driver when suspending. However, it might be by
now that the original bugs in those drivers have been fixed in the
kernel thus eliminating the need for the workarounds and just confusing
matters on new setups.

Of course there may be new EeePC models whose hotkeys do not work out of
the box. However, eeepc-acpi-scripts does not seem to provide support
for hotkeys aside from wireless, brightness and volume so if keys aside
from those are not working this package would not help (but if ACPI
events were being sent it would help. However it sounds like laptop
vendors are moving away from sending hotkeys as ACPI events and towards
things like WMI).

I can see these scripts being invaluable if you are on an old kernel but
many of the functions it provides are directly supported by the kernel
in modern distros (since 2.6.28 I would guess).  Further, this bug will
continue to attract comments because if a new EeePC comes out whose
hotkeys do not work a Google search will often turn up this bug report
when really this bug is for the original range of EeePCs whose issues
have been long fixed.

-- 
eeepc-acpi-scripts is not installable
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/262679
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Eee Coders, which is the registrant for Easy Peasy.

Status in EasyPeasy Overview: Confirmed
Status in Easy Peasy: Invalid
Status in “acpi” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed
Status in “eeepc-acpi-scripts” package in Ubuntu: Incomplete

Bug description:
Binary package hint: eeepc-acpi-scripts

eeepc-acpi-scripts depends on acpi-support-base, which is not available in intrepid. Furthermore, the scripts attempt to load the ath_pci module, which is known not to work with the eeepc. Instead it needs to be updated to use the ath5k module which is included with 2.6.27 kernel, and works fine, providing the ath_pci driver is blacklisted. Otherwise, there is no point in having the package available.