On Wed, 22 Nov 2000, Michael Schmitz wrote:
> > > to poke around on the FTP site. If someone knows of a PPC or PowerMac
> > > specific utils package, I'd appreciate a hint.
> >
> > powerpc-utils sounds like a good candidate, right now all it has is
> > clock, mousemode and nvsetenv.
>
> Argh - what I looked for was mousehack not mousemode, that's why I didn't
> find it.
>
> We could perhaps even take fblevel out of pmud and add it to
> powerpc-utils... does display brightness setting by fblevel also work with
> other LCD displays on desktop machines?
>
Maybe that's a good opportunity to suggest to add the fnkeys tool, as well.
Unfortunately, that app doesn't exist yet :o(.
A while ago, I was asking for a way to switch the setting of the F[1-12]
keys combined with the Fn-key on the powerbook in Linux
(default F-keys <-> default backlight control etc.)
BenH brought up some information on the register settings involved, and
I tried to modify trackpad.c following his suggestions, but I'm afraid I
don't really understand which registers trackpad is reading/writing.
> I've done some hacking on MacOS today and found that the Fn key behaviour
> can apparently be triggered by setting an ADB register of the keyboard.
>
> If you write 0xc6 0x01 to register 1 of the keyboard, the Fx keys will be
> real function keys by default and Fn will trigger the control buttons.
> Write 0xc6 00 to revert the behaviour to default.
>
> So a userland tool can be easily hacked using the trackpad tool source as
> an example, you have to find the keyboard instead of the trackpad (device
> with default and current address 2 should always work on PowerBook and
> iBook ADB) and then do the register write of a 2 bytes message
> (0xc6 0x01). I can't try this now, but if someone wants to look at it...
>
If someone more insightful has some time to spend on this, this should be a
very useful addition to powerpc-utils (essentialy a powerbook-util, of course,
but there probably isn't such a package).
Regards,
Derek
