It’s been a while, so:

1) I’ve posted the final version of the patches to add rfkill support to acer-wmi on the 15th September to the ACPI mailing list.

_Hopefully_ these will go in for 2.6.28.

(This is only for wireless and bluetooth - still waiting for someone to use Linux on an Acer laptop that has built in 3G).

2) For now, rfkill is implemented by polling WMI every second to find the current state of the wireless and bluetooth devices. In future (at least, for WMID compatible laptops), it may be possible to switch this over to a WMI event based system, and avoid polling on those machines, but this will require extensive testing (especially on older machines, such as the Aspire 5040). I may get round to reposting my patch for this somewhere so the more adventurous among you can try it out and feed back.

3) From a button perspective, this will depend on how well rfkill-input is working these days (I haven’t tested lately). However, in HAL, all Acer laptops should be using the same basic keymap now, so we don’t need to keep patching for every single (near identical) laptop for KEY_WLAN and KEY_BLUETOOTH.

4) Unrelated aside to Acer Aspire One owners (so that this is documented somewhere) - it’s not supported by acer-wmi. It only provides a ‘dummy’ interface - the methods in the interface itself don’t actually do anything.

I may explicitly blacklist it in future so that people are aware of this.

3 Responses to “rfkill update”

1. Rohan Dhruva Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 4:14 pm

   Hi. Thanks for the update, we had not heard from you for such a long time!

   Anyway, one question - there problem of dollar and euro key not working because they were assigned scancode outside the kernel acceptable range. Is that problem solved now?

   Keep up the great work

2. Carlos Corbacho Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

   IIRC, the relevant patch has gone into the kernel (for 2.6.27 I think…)

   I think there’s still some work needed on the X side though.

3. Rohan Dhruva Says:
   September 30th, 2008 at 8:05 pm

   OK, so dollar and euro keys stil won’t work out of the box?

Post A Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.