questions vanity lights

[Michael E Brown]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 11:59:11AM +0100, Oliver Eichler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> the latest add-on to control the XPS vanity lights is highly
> appreciated. Just a couple questions:
> 
> 1. The tools will run just for root. What has to be done to use them as
> user, too? How do I make the dcdbas driver to load automatically? I
> guess I have to make an entry to modprobe.conf for a certain device. But
> what has to be entered exactly?

You have to have root access to access dcdbas. Unless you make the binary
setUid, this is not a limitation I can fix. I have not audited any of the code
to ensure safety for setUid operation, though.

Autoloading the driver: I'm not sure. Most distributions have a file you can
put the names of modules you want autoloaded at boot time.


> 2. Is there a plan to wrap this into a nice API for easy integration
> into applications? Something like:
>   CVanityLights::setFanColor(color)
>   CVanityLights::setLidColor(color)
>   CVanityLights::setSpeakerColor(color)
>   CVanityLights::setToutchPad(on|off)
>   CVanityLights::setBrightness(level)
>   CVanityLights::saveToBios()
>   ...

I would be happy to entertain a patch for this. All the code is in
dellLEDCtl.cpp and could easily be converted into library functions and placed
into the public API.

> 
> 3. "dellLEDCtl -i" tells me that my touch LED info is not supoorted (XPS
> M1710) Zone 4 is reported to be ruby, which is correct. However I can
> not switch it off by 'dellLEDCtrl -z4 0'. What do I have to do to give
> you some debug info?

This I dont know. All of the relevant docs are in the code. Ed might have some
idea. I dont have a platform to test this on, so I am relying on community
contributions to keep this one going. Patches accepted.

--
Michael