Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 110459
Hardware Profiles for docked and undocked laptops
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:40:33 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Description of problem: I have a laptop that I use docked at work and undocked while on the road. I'd like to have a way of automatically selecting a hardware profile that would encompass console keyboard and mouse, and X screen, keyboard and mouse, and network cards. e.g. Docked I have a USB keyboard and mouse, a 1600x1200 screen and 3 network cards (I use the docking station one). Undocked I have ps2 keyboard and mouse, a 1400x1050 and 2 network cards. Further complicating this is that the docked config has the wireless card as eth2, the laptop ethernet port as eth0 and the dock ethernet port as eth1. Removing the laptop from the dock removes the eth1, replacing it with the wireless port. Of course this doesn't address the half dozen or so wireless nets I roam among... Ideally I'd like to have a gnome applet displaying which hardware config I'm using, and a control panel app to configure profiles. This enhancement would have to manage GPM, XF86Config and network configs. Depending on how large a scope this app addressed, it may have to manage services as well; e.g. controlling pcmcia slots, turning on/off postfix, managing firewall etc. This is pretty much the limit of my expertise; I wrote some quick shell scripts to control wireless nets when I was using gentoo, but didn't get as far as controlling X screen resolutions. I am not confident of my ability to write a gnome applet or control panel app. I'd be very enthusiastic and happy to pitch in any way I can though. I'm however aware that this is a fairly large change for a small usergroup; how many people would use fedora on laptops, and how many of those would dock those laptops... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Not applicable to a RFE Additional info:
Nothing for the kernel to do afaics. Kudzu could switch profile on boot up though I suppose. Bill ? We also already have apm scripts I think, so changing dynamically when the user changes power source from AC to battery and vice versa is probably easy enough. Don't know how well these play with ACPI. As for a gnome-applet, afaik, nothing like this exists, and I don't know of any work ongoing in that area. Havoc ?
Additionally, ignore the wibbling about eth* numbers changing. That happened in gentoo, not in fedora/kudzu which do the correct thing (imho) and keep the numbers consistent.
Has there been any more development in this area? At the very least I would like a way to mark device as "permanently removable" so that kudzu won't keep asking me to remove the configuration everytime I take the machine out of the dock. I've also thought about doing some work on automatically selecting a netprofile based on the network devices present, but this isn't as big a deal.
Network profile type things are probably best done in the future via NetworkManager. Aside from that, the UI has been removed from kudzu, so it shouldn't be popping remove events in current releases. Hence, closing this bug.