eee-control 0.9.4 karmic deb repackage

1. Description
2. Comments
3. News
4. Fixes
5. Known to work with
6. Known to not work with
7. More information
8. Download
9. Very partial changelog
10. Repackaging the deb

1 Description

Grigori Goronzy's eee-control 0.9.4 deb repackaged to seemingly work with Ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala.

This version has a number of changes found on the eeeuser.com forums.

Development on eee-control have been moved to launchpad.net. I have moved on from eee-control to using Jupiter to reduce cpu cycles and fancontrol to control the fan, both these things reduces noise. I have described how at My Ubuntu 11.10 Eee 1011PX setup.

2 Comments

Comments.

3 News

9 May 2010: New version (7). Added lucid icons by Timo Kluck, fixed switch to powersave on battery and switch back when on AC.

Also. My continued hacking of eee-control has turned it into a rather weird tool. Some settings are ignored, some features doesn't work and it all depends a lot on which eee model you use.

I think it's time to start looking for alternatives to eee-control.

I personally doesn't use eee-control anymore. I have a 901 and am using plain Ubuntu lucid with the following 2 changes (no extra installations needed):
- Made fan control more relaxed (be silent until temperature gets above 62 C). I did this by running pwmconfig.
- Switch to powersave when on battery. I made a script for this that's included in eee-control (installed to /etc/pm/power.d/cpu_governor).
I would like to add a notice here directing people to possible alternatives depending on which problems they have. So I would like to know which problems you've encountered in Ubuntu and the best solution you've found to them.

Note that I consider eee-control alternatives to be simple installable programs running on plain Ubuntu. I consider specialized distributions (like EasyPeasy, eeebuntu) as last resorts.
18 Mar 2010: New version. Fixed wifi toggling in 901go thanks to SergioA from the italien eee forums for finding the problem and helping fix it. The problem was that some of Tyr's changes wasn't activated, and eee-control got confused that there were 2 wireless devices (901go has a radio).
9 Mar 2010: Maarten Fonville (from the 1101HA brightness fix) set up a PPA so you don't have to look here for updates.
9 Mar 2010: Till Sachau added gnome-power-manager integration. This should fix auto-changing powermode setting when switching to battery. Till avoided integrating the camera as it caused problems on his A1101HA, I'm not sure if this has any effect.
25 Feb 2010: Sat Deshpande added support for 1201HA (1201HAB) (v4).
10 Feb 2010: Added support for 901go (all changes by Tyr)
28 Jan 2010: Properly fixed for 70x without camera (thanks to bsdwave). Also added a few fixes to make it work slightly more with 1101HA (thanks to lokutus).
11 Jan 2010: Fixed for 70x models without camera.
9 Jan 2010: Seems to work with Eee 1000, tested by dude1phoenix from eeeuser.com forum. Also added tip to get CPU scaling to work with Eee 1000.
25 Dec. 2009: Arno Luijten mentioned the new version seems to work with 1000H, added list of platforms it's tested on.
23 Dec. 2009: Hmm, made a lot more mistakes than just that, updated deb.
23 Dec. 2009: Argh! made the mistake in packaging the deb I really tried to avoid., so replaced newest. Thanks to Randy Schrock for the heads-up.
16 Dec. 2009: The instruction for deb repackaging seems to be tar'ing incorrectly, so fixed.
16 Dec. 2009: Fix for 1101HA (kernel 2.6.32) brightness by Maarten Fonville, Fix for 1101HA camera errors (by disabling camera controls) by jbernardo (eeeuser.com thread)
2 Nov. 2009: Fixed problem with deleting package didn't work.

4 Fixes

Making the deb installable on karmic.
Making removing the deb possible.
1101HA disable camera control (to remove warnings).
1101HA (kernel 2.6.32) brightness fix.
Don't fail if no brightness control file found.
Don't fail when using 70x without a camera.
Disabled camera for all 70x models.
Added 1101HA as a supported model (removed warning).
Made a missing file error fail silently.
Added support for 901go
Added support for 1201HA (1201HAB)
Fixed gnome-power-manager integration.
powersave on battery (When going on battery it switches to powersave. When going back on AC it switches to settings as they were when you went on battery. There are no settings to change this. Any settings in eee-control about this doesn't work anymore).

All these fixes were added or removed haphazardly until it seemed to work on my eee 901. Maarten Fonville tested the 1101HA fixes.

5 Known to work with

Eee 901
Eee 1000
Eee 1000H (CPU scaling works when setting fsb-method: direct-io in /etc/eee-control.conf.)
Eee 1101HA (no camera control, no alot of things)
Eee 901go
Eee 1201HAB

6 Known to not work with

7 More information

I saw the code that fixed eee-control for 9.10 on the eeeuser.com forum, where there are discussions on which eee variants works and how to get around some common bugs.

Direct link to topic about eee-control on eeeuser.com just after the post I made linking to this site: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=43975&p=29

8 Download

eee-control_0.9.4.7_all~karmic_{unofficial.deb} (9. May 2010) newest
eee-control_0.9.4.6_all~karmic_{unofficial.deb} (18. Mar 2010)
eee-control_0.9.4.5_all~karmic_{unofficial.deb} (9. Mar 2010)
eee-control_0.9.4.4_all~karmic_{unofficial.deb} (25. Feb 2010)
eee-control_0.9.4.3-1_all~karmic_{unofficial.deb} (10. Feb 2010)
eee-control_0.9.4.3_all~karmic_{unofficial.deb} (28. Jan 2010)
eee-control_0.9.4.2_all~karmic_{unofficial.deb} (11. Jan 2010)
eee-control_0.9.4_all~karmic_unofficial_1.deb (23. Dec 2009)
eee-control_0.9.4_all~karmic_unofficial₂₀₀₉₁₁_02.deb (2. Nov 2009)

9 Very partial changelog

9.1 Removing the .deb downloaded before 2 Nov. 2009

In /var/lib/dpkg/info/eee-control.prerm, comment out line 16:

: #deconfig_dkms

Then removing the deb should work.

9.2 Changes for the 11. Jan 2010 deb.

Added to lines 168-169 in /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/EeeControl/actions.py:

if not os.path.exists(os.path.join(self.acpi_base, "camera")):
    self.model.features = filter(lambda x: x != "camera", self.model.features)

9.3 Changes for the 23. Dec 2009 deb.

This makes the 16. Dec 2009 deb workable.

Standard brightness file not found on my 901, added another brightness file path to usr/bin/eee-control-daemon:

elif os.path.exists(os.path.join(acpi_base, "backlight/eeepc/brightness")):
    brn_path = os.path.join(acpi_base, "backlight/eeepc/brightness")

If no brightness file is found, it's set to /dev/null, but that fails when trying to start the daemon as it tries to convert the empty string into a integer. Added a small check to actions.py line 254:

if l.strip() == '':
    l = '0'

9.4 Changes for the 16. Dec 2009 deb.

Added brightness path file check to eee-control-daemon:

elif os.path.exists("/sys/class/backlight/psblvds/brightness"):
    brn_path = "/sys/class/backlight/psblvds/brightness"

From post http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=658816#p658816 by jbernardo.

Added 1101HA class to models.py that inherits from 1000HE, but disables the camera:

class EeePc1101HA(EeePc1000HE):
    def __init__(self, action):
        EeePc1000HE.__init__(self, action)
        self.features = "wifi", "bt", "reader", "touchpad"
        self.action_map = {
            0x10: self.action.wifi_toggle,
            0x11: self.action.wifi_toggle,
            0x13: self.action.mute,
            0x14: self.action.vol_down,
            0x15: self.action.vol_up,
        }

And added "1101HA": EeePc1101HA to MODEL_MAP. From post http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=659421#p659421 by jbernardo.

9.5 Changes for the 2. Nov 2009 deb.

In /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/EeeControl/she.py added:

locations = [
     "/proc/acpi/asus/cpufv",
     "/sys/devices/platform/eeepc/she"
     "/sys/devices/platform/eeepc/she",
     "/sys/devices/platform/eeepc/cpufv",
     "/sys/devices/platform/eeepc/available_cpufv"
 ]

Removed hotkey-setup from dependencies.
Added python-dev, hotkeys and gettext to dependencies (not sure if these are necessary).
Commented out DKMS module installation.

10 Repackaging the deb

Download http://greg.geekmind.org/eee-control/deb/eee-control_0.9.4_all~jaunty.deb
Changing the code:

ar x eee-control_0.9.4_all~karmic.deb data.tar.gz
mkdir data
cd data
tar xzvf ../data.tar.gz
emacs usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/EeeControl/she.py
# change code.
tar czvf ../data.tar.gz *
cd ..
ar r eee-control_0.9.4_all~karmic.deb data.tar.gz

Changing the dependencies and installation process.

ar x eee-control_0.9.4_all~karmic.deb control.tar.gz
mkdir control
cd control
tar xzvf ../control.tar.gz
emacs control
# change dependencies.
emacs postinst
# comment out 'config_dkms' on line 19.
tar czvf ../control.tar.gz *
cd ..
ar r eee-control_0.9.4_all~karmic.deb control.tar.gz