Casper Dik's Weblog

Tuesday June 28, 2005

First Installment (of frkit) I've teased people before about the nifty hacks I've been doing for my Ferrari 3400 laptop.

The hacks I did and the tool I wrote to make the distribution easier were so well liked that there was this "meme" propagating that whenever we got even cooler laptops, I should get the first one. And so it happened, I literally got the first Ferrari 4000 shipped to Sun.

Now, this is a whole different beast than the Ferrari 3400 and I haven't yet gotten quite to the same comfort level yet.

I've long promised to make all of the neat stuff available, but legalities are the difficult part of such a venture. But now with OpenSolaris and a supported license scheme (plus management buy-in), I now feel comfortable to release the stuff which I wrote or was derived from source now available under the CDDL)

The first installment includes my single CPU "PowerNow!(tm)" driver and my battery driver and utility.

What the heck, let's throw in the mdb scripts which enable the additional keys on the Acer keyboards (mail, www, P1, P2, audio control). Some of these appear standard controls and may work for internet keyboards as well.

The tar.gz files all come with an install script which will take care of all the details of the installation; the battery driver requires ACPICA; that is only included in Solaris Nevada (11) build 14 and later.

I'll see what I can do about the GNOME battery utility we've done as well; oh, sorry for the somewhat lacking documentation.

Update: I've added acpipowertool, a small graphic battery meter by Matt Simmons, and fixed some installation issues for root user's without "nm" in $PATH.

Update2: (2005/7/31) Ive upgraded powernow so it works for more systems and to better integrate powernowadm with SMF; apcidrv is also updated to do a little bit more of thermal zone handling.

acpidrv only works for Solaris express build 14 and later; powernow should work with Solaris 10 GA also.

Update3: frkit is for some time now available as runnable script at www.opensolaris.org in the (2005-06-28 08:26:54.0) Permalink Comments [25]