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I’ve just released pommed v1.32, a minor maintenance release for the 12″ PowerBook G4.
I’ve just realized that I did not post an announce for pommed v1.31 a while back, which was also a maintenance release, adding support for the MacBookPro5,4 (15″ June 2009) and the latest wireless keyboard.
Pommed v1.30 is a bug fix release fixing two small bugs:
If you are running on a recent MacBook/MacBook Pro with a recent kernel, you’ll probably want to upgrade to this release.
pommed v1.29 is a bugfix release, kind of. The fix is an architectural one related to the video mode switch feature.
When pressing the video switch key, your graphical pommed client of choice checks which VT its X server is running on and whether this VT is the active one before executing your video mode switch script.
To check that the VT is currently active, it is necessary to open one VT (we use the one our X server is running on) and perform an ioctl() call on it.
Depending on your setup (login manager or startx, basically), your user will or will not have any right on the device node associated to the VT. Which means the VT state checking code would always fail in some setups.
This is now fixed by moving that code into pommed itself, with a DBus method for the clients to call. You’ll need to update both pommed and the clients for this to work, for obvious reasons.
pommed v1.27 is out as a maintenance release adding support for 3 of the newer machines:
Some machines are still missing, as I haven’t got any report about them yet.
Looks like the keyboard backlight behaviour and keys handling will have to be modified slightly for the new machines, but it’s really touchy to get right. I’ll need to try it out on the actual hardware.
I’ve just released a maintenance release of pommed. Nothing new under the sun in this one:
There are a couple of ideas floating around, we’ll see if any one of those lands into a future release.
I’ve migrated pommed to git yesterday. The public URLs for the git repository are:
git://git.debian.org/git/pommed/pommed.git
http://git.debian.org/git/pommed/pommed.git
The SVN repository will disappear shortly.
Two fixes in this release, let’s start with the more important one :)
The DBus configuration file shipped with pommed now explicitly allows method calls to org.pommed, which is needed with the newer versions of DBus where the default configuration on the system bus has been made more strict to close a security hole. If the pommed clients stopped working for you after a DBus update, replace /etc/dbus-1/system.d/pommed.conf by the dbus-policy.conf file shipped with pommed.
Second fix is related to the Apple wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard, which previous versions of pommed would recognize just fine but reject because it exposes a type of events usually indicative of a mouse (and pommed doesn’t listen to mouse devices). This is now fixed for this particular keyboard, so pommed will react to the hotkeys on this keyboard too.
For the complete list of changes, see the ChangeLog file in the source distribution. Comments at the usual address :)
pommed 1.24 is out; this is a maintenance release addressing the HID changes in the 2.6.28 kernel.
HID quirks have been split out into hardware/vendor-specific submodules; consequently the sysfs path for the fnmode parameter changed as it’s now handled by the hid_apple module and that needed to be accounted for.
No rush if you’re running an older kernel :)
pommed v1.23 is out, with full support for the late 2008 laptops.
The LCD backlight inner workings got figured out finally, but there’s a catch: the backlight won’t react to the settings when running X11 with the proprietary nVidia drivers on the MacBook5,1 and the MacBookAir2,1. It works fine on the MacBookPro5,1 and it works fine on all three machines with the opensource nouveau driver. Switching to the console before setting the backlight and then back to X does work as a workaround.
So there’s something up with the proprietary nVidia driver, and my uneducated guess is that the MacBook Pro may somehow be exempt from the issue due to its dual GPU config.
I’ve also switched the nVidia machines to using the generic sysfs backlight driver in pommed. This driver has been there for some time for the PowerPC machines, so now it’s part of the generic pommed code. You need the mbp_nvidia_bl driver in your kernel for this to work.
Don’t panic! If you don’t have it, pommed will fall back to the native driver (nv8600mgt) and everything will work just as before. Pommed will tell you if it has to fall back to the native driver, so check your logs if you want to know.
This release of pommed needs testing on all nVidia machines: MacBookPro3,1, MacBookPro4,1, MacBookPro5,1, MacBook5,1 and MacBookAir2,1. If anything doesn’t work, tell me about it and I’ll fix it.