itzwam/pommed-light

A trimmed version of the pommed hotkey handler for macbooks

About pommed-light

This is a stripped-down version of pommed with client, dbus, and ambient light sensor support removed, optimized for use with dwm and the like.

README for pommed

• Kernel version requirements
• Supported machines
• Using pommed
• Beeper feature
• When things go wrong

System requirements:

Pommed expects standard development headers for libc to be installed, as well as libpci.

pommed requires at least a 2.6.25 kernel, due to the use of the new timerfd interface that was released as stable with this version.

February and October 2008 machines require a 2.6.28 kernel for full support.

Using pommed

Launch pommed at startup, a simple init script will do. Your distribution should take care of this. A standard init script and a systemd service file are provided.

Keyboard backlight on PowerMac machines

The keyboard backlight on PowerMac machines (except the very first ones) is driven through i2c. You need the i2c-dev kernel module loaded on your system for pommed to work properly; you can add i2c-dev to /etc/modules to have it loaded automatically at system startup.

Backlight driver in MacbookAir6,2 (and 6,1)

There is a known bug of the intel backlight driver that leaves the screen either at ~5% or ~95% brightness after suspension, no matter what actual brightness value you try to set.

There is a proposed workaround kernel driver (mba6x_bl) that solves the problem, but it's not yet in mainline. The changes made to pommed to work with MBA6,2 and 6,1 rely on that driver so you should be using it.

Beeper feature

The beeper feature relies on the uinput kernel module being loaded. You can check for its availability by checking for the uinput device node, which is either one of:

• /dev/input/uinput
• /dev/uinput
• /dev/misc/uinput

Or by checking the output of $ lsmod | grep uinput

If the module is not loaded, load it manually with

modprobe uinput

then restart pommed. You'll need to ensure the module is loaded before pommed starts; to achieve that, add uinput to /etc/modules.

For the curious, as I've been asked a couple times already: pommed uses the uinput facility to create a userspace input device which handles the console beep. Once this device is set up, the kernel happily passes down beep events to pommed through this device, and pommed only needs to ... well, beep.

When things go wrong

First and foremost: don't panic!

If something doesn't work (or so it appears), there's usually a good reason to that, and pommed should be able to provide some insight as to what is going wrong if only you ask it.

By default, pommed uses syslog to log warnings and errors, so check your system logs. If you can't find anything, running pommed in the foreground will help a lot; in this mode, pommed will log everything to stderr instead of syslog, so you'll see every message.

First, stop pommed. Then run

pommed -f

Use Ctrl-C to stop pommed, fix the problem, and restart it.

If you still can't see what's wrong, ask for more output by running pommed in debug mode. Be warned: in this mode, pommed is very chatty.

First, stop pommed. Then run

pommed -d

Use Ctrl-C to stop pommed, fix the problem, and restart it.

If the debug mode doesn't offer any hint as to what's going on, then contact me with the details of your problem and I'll be able to help.