Re: How to add the Asus R1F to asus-laptop.c?

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From: Lennart Sorensen
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - 10:06 am

My wife has an Asu R1F and I have been trying to help her get wireless
networking to work on it.

The chipset is an intel 3945abg, so that part should be simple, and the
driver does in fact load and see things.  unfortunately the radio is
killed and there is no hardware switch to toggling it.  Instead you have
to use fn-F2 as on many other Asus laptops.

I have managed to manually toggle it and see the Ap by poking at values
exported by asus-acpi in /proc and /sys, but that isn't very convinient.

It would appear that the asus-laptop driver is supposed to manage
hotkeys on many asus laptops, but unfortunately the R1F isn't recognized
by the driver, which refuses to load.

Looking at the sourceforge.net page mentioned in asus-laptop.c as the
development site, I see that there is in fact a patch submitted for the
R1F (which is almost the same as the M2E) to that site in may 2007, but
apparently no one monitors that site anymore, and it never got submitted
to the kernel.

Who needs to be poked to have anything like that happen?  Why is that
site listed in the driver anymore, if it isn't being used now?

If I test out the patch and it works, should I submit it here to have it
included so that this can be solved once and for all?

-- 
Len Sorensen
--

From: Alistair John Strachan
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - 10:59 am

Unless I'm mistaken, the current asus-laptop maintainer is Corentin Chary, who 
I've added to CC on your behalf.


-- 
Cheers,
Alistair.
--

From: Lennart Sorensen
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - 1:16 pm

Excellent.  Now where do I find such info?

-- 
Len Sorensen
--

From: Alistair John Strachan
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - 1:32 pm

MAINTAINERS, though admittedly the section is dubiously named. His name's also 
present in the copyright in the source file (drivers/misc/asus-laptop.c). It's 
also present in the source code log for this file (git log drivers/misc/asus-
laptop.c) if you discount people who have made only janitorial or API changes.

Either way, he's CC'ed, and hopefully more responsive than the sourceforge 
project :-) If not, pester Andrew Morton with the patch (and Andi Kleen, since 
it's ACPI territory).

-- 
Cheers,
Alistair.
--

From: Lennart Sorensen
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - 1:39 pm

OK.  I will go test the patch out and see if it still works.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--

From: Corentin Chary
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - 11:48 pm

Hi,
Currently I've no internet connection, so I'm depend off the hotspot I
can found when I'm close to my windows
Anyway, my connection will be activated soon, so please poke me again monday.
I'ts true that I should take a look at sf.net patchs ...
Anyway, this laptop should work with asus-laptop oO.
modprobe asus-laptop gives you "No such device" ?

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 10:39 PM, Lennart Sorensen
--

From: Lennart Sorensen
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008 - 6:41 am

Using 2.6.26, I get no such device and the driver refuses to load.
asus-acpi loads fine and does its job.

I will try the patch and see if that helps.  I was rather surprised that
it didn't load, so I started doing acpi dumps and looking at the driver
to see if I could figure out what it used to determine things.  It
looked to me like it checks if the hotkey registration works, which by
the looks of it it isn't doing at the moment.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--

From: Lennart Sorensen
Date: Thursday, November 27, 2008 - 8:14 am

I finally got a chance to play with this.  Turns out asus-laptop DOES
work.  It however does NOT work if asus-acpi is already loaded, which
for some reason udev likes to do automatically because both claim to
support the same devices, but they sure aren't equal.

Now once asus-acpi is unloaded and asus-laptop loaded, then it does
appear to do stuff.  fn+f2 does manage to do something, although not
consistently or very reliably, but I suspect that may be a user space
acpi events problem to do with the scripts that are run when the key is
hit, so I have to play with that a bit more.

It does appear that when loaded, the wifi rf_kill is cleared, but after
hitting fn+f2 a few times, it gets set again and never clears after that
other than by unloading and reloading asus-laptop, so something fishy is
still going on.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--

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