On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Jason Simpson wrote:

> Hi. I just recently got an IBM z50, pretty much exclusively to use as a
> motorless, wireless, silent internet terminal with NetBSD. I've got a

<snip>

> But, there are some things I'd like to do or at least know more about:

<snip> 

>   * How do you usually handle periods when you want to shut it off? I've
> just been leaving it plugged in and on since the suspend button doesn't
> shut off the screen, and I don't want to have to wait for it to reboot
> every time I want to use it, but that seems like a big waste of power
> and probably shortens its lifespan.

There is actually code in the source tree to turn off the LCD on
suspend.  IIRC, it's not compiled into the kernel by default, however, so
you'd have to build your own.  I think you're the 4th or 5th person that I
know of that's asked about this.  :)

Also, the LCD suspend is a bit flakey.  It crashes my machine about every
20th resume or so.  I don't recall if this is just when running X or if it
happens on the console as well.  In any case, I remember thinking that the
LCD suspend code needed to be modified because it was using some static
timings which were actually supposed to be dynamically computed based on
the state of the LCD controller.  This is probably why it's hanging every
so often, but it's been so long that I can't really remember.
 
I've been wanting to take some time and figure out what's going on with
this since I'm using it myself (you could use my July 23rd kernel to play
with it) but I really just don't have the time.  Same goes for some
niggling issues with the trackpoint (erratic movement under system
load) that I still need to work out.

>   * Why are the arrow keys so whacked out under X? (Thanks Billy Ball
> for your instructions on getting them to work at all!)

This is probably because the physical keyboard layout has been hacked to
add 'useful' abilities to some keys and compress the keyboard footprint a
bit, thus making it not US 101-key compatible.

>   * Is there any way to emulate the middle mouse button under X?

Not at the moment.  Sounds like this would need incorporation of the
trackpoint driver into the keyboard driver somehow.  I'm pretty sure it's
possible; I just need the time to look through the keyboard/mouse driver
code and figure out what to interface with.

>   * Is the X server in the snapshot using any video acceleration
> features of the hardware?

... are there any video acceleration features of the hardware?  :)  IIRC,
it's just a simple little framebuffer mapped into the address space.  I
would be surprised to find any kind of acceleration features whatsoever
since it is basically an embedded device and it's only 640x480.

<snip>

- Greg Hughes