Linux support for TC1000

Hi,

My name is Samphan Raruenrom. I'm a senior developer
in the "Open Source Project" at NECTEC, a research
center in Thailand. Our most well-known project is
Linux-TLE, a RedHat-based Thai-centric distro.
It is this particular distro that 'almost' get
installed in the cancelled HP first linux notebook
that was planned to be sold at very low price in
Thailand.

I love TC1000 and I use it for almost everything.
I only use Linux and I'd like to do almost everything
WinXP users can do on their TC1000.
Most high-level support in Linux/X seem to be ok now.
One thing that is totally missing is low-level support
for TC1000 specific hardware, e.g. LCD (for brightness
control), which would require a kernel driver to be
written. Having such driver can, for an example, make
for better use of the battery.

Toshiba notebooks have such support in 2.4 kernel, ASUS
notebooks in 2.5. The authors of both drivers have to
reverse-engineer the Windows driver to get the information
about the ports/values to be able to do that.
I'm not that good as a hacker. I'm just a user-mode hacker.
But I want to see linux full support for TC1000 and like to spend
some spare time to implement the features.
It'd be a plus if the same driver can be used for
other Evo-serie notebooks too.

So, is it possible for HP to open the source for the
Q menu software? (for me to reverse-engineer)
Or open the specification of the Notebook's hardware interface
(like http://www.buzzard.org.uk/toshiba/docs.html)

Regards,
Samphan Raruenrom,
The Open Source Project,
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center,
Thailand.
Received on Sat Jul 05 20:38:20 2003