Laptop Enhancements (was Re: What next?)

[Jeff Pitman]

On Thursday 02 June 2005 07:31, Kaj J. Niemi wrote:
> > I'd like to see better laptop support, in particular some sort of
> > Profile support as well as better wireless support. Currently to
> > have my laptop work both at home and at work (in dual mode), i have
> > to hack rc.sysinit horribly to extend the semantic of the
> > 'netprofile=' kernel argument so that it also changes the Xorg.conf
> > file, .gconf files, and so on....
>
> I would like automatic second display support (when connecting your
> laptop to a projector for example). So far I haven't been able to
> figure out how to do it except restart X with different settings.
> IMHO, it's one feature Apple's Powerbooks do really well running OS
> X.

This should be requested upstream at X.org. All Fedora can do is provide 
config hackery.  Automation by flipping between resolutions. meta 
modes, virtual resolutions, merged FB, xinerama, etc. etc. is the realm 
of X.org.

Anyway, I can't even get the CRT/LCD switch to work since ACPI, it's 
just always on my IBM T30.

I'd like to see better default configs for Synaptics.

Recommend MergedFB over Xinerama. It's got some quirks, but it's faster. 
(Not all cards support it.)

There also needs to be a massive undertaking to get Sleep in ACPI to 
actually function for a wide range of supported laptops. This includes 
participation in upstream ACPI to get patches and configs in.  Also 
should include populating /etc/acpi/actions, /etc/acpi/events with the 
right stuff to get better behavior during sleep.  Scripts could throw 
in cute things like kdialog or gdialog to bring up dialogs like 
"Computer sleeping...".  Maybe a patch to Dbus to get an event 
instead .. who knows.

Maybe there needs to be a fedora laptop mailing list, project, and 
working group to address all of these issues and other miscellaneous 
howtos littering the internet.  Dealing with packaging for different 
laptop configurations would also be an interesting issue to address.

-- 
-jeff