Holger's Blog

Long time no post, and a lot of things happened. At least to me. Forgot to mention last time, for anyone interested, I started college at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in middle of october with course of studies in computer science. On Friday, the winter semester was over - finally. Learning all this difficult and completely new stuff is quite different from what I've been doing the last couple of years at SUSE. So I was really busy the last months to reconcile university and my work on linux ;-)

Well, but my time at SUSE isn't over, of course, still working there at regular times, just not that much like before. And therefore, I wasn't able to be as active in regard to linux as I hoped to be. You can't be very innovative, you just have to do the things that have to be done. Working on bugs, handling mail, etc.. I'll have two exams in middle of March, though, but except from that, until the new semester starts, I will be able to work fulltime on linux.

Nevertheless, openSUSE 10.2 was released during this time, and I finally finished the power management redesign announced some time ago. Doing stuff like integrating pm-utils, the CPUFreq HAL addon, adjusting the powersave daemon or failing to get more involved in kpowersave's future development.

Not to forget about dockutils, a framework, or better, a collection of scripts providing an infrastructure to easily trigger actions on docking/undocking requests for different laptops and vendors. To quote the openSUSE wiki page where you can find more information, it shall be the following, not more and not less:

• Provide infrastructure to do userspace stuff that has to be done on dock and undock
• Provide easy to use infrastructure for hardware vendors, distributors or users to get proper docking station support or to do just anything they like on dock/undock, for instance starting a special tool or just displaying a message on the desktop.
• Provide infrastructure for nasty and ugly workarounds either because of broken hardware, bugs or just because of a lack of support in the kernel

There are some basic scripts already included, at least to get the X60 dock station and some other Thinkpads working, but there's also still lot to do. Some days ago I registered a project at sourceforge. I'm not even sure if dockutils prevails itself, but I needed a place to host the code, and I did not want to just include it in the openSUSE rpms. So if you like to have a look at it, check it out:

svn co https://dockutils.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dockutils dockutils

Just to prevent questions: Yes, I know that there is a new generic dock station driver (and bay driver) in recent kernels, and yes, I already got familiar with it, and yes, I will do the integration into HAL and openSUSE very soon ;-)

Unfortunatelly, we get rare feedback on docking. Therefore I like to ask some questions:

Do you have a docking station? Does it work for you? Does it work combined with suspend/resume? Does the hardware included in the dock station work after docking/undocking? Do you have a workaround or a script to get it working? Please drop a comment, send me a mail or create a bugreport if you can answer any of the above questions. Otherwise it will be nearly impossible to improve docking station support. You can find my email at the openSUSE. Thanks.

Next post will follow very soon, because I will have to write something very exciting (at least to me) regarding the Nokia n800 I received a developer code for, thanks Nokia!

Regards, Holger