Ibm Special Buttons

I have just installed Suse 9.1 on my IBM thinkpad T42 and everything fine until now. I have install the tpb.rpm which should enable control to the special buttons of the ThinkPad. And it does, with some restrictions. When I want to set a presentation, the menu for selecting the presentation type does not pop up. Probably it enables the output signal to the projector becasue all the others buttons are working without showing a notification on the screen.

It is this special software made by IBM available for Linux as well? I mean the popus allowing you to vizualize the changes made by the special buttons.

Firstly there is no special software made by IBM. You can find information regarding TPB here. TPB makes it possible to bind a program to the ThinkPad buttons, for you I think that would be the "IBM Access" button. TPB can also run a callback program on each state change with the changed state and the new state as options.
If you're looking for an on-screen display, like you get in windows when you press a button, you'll need to also install xosd.

hi sarvinc and thanks for the reply

I have looked for the osd but I could not find it. All the documentattion I got is saying that the tpb.rpm contains the osd. By simply installing the tpb.rpm seems that the osd is not installed. Do you have any idea how to manage this in order to get the "menu" on the screen?

I'm sorry, I was in a rush and looking back on my post I can see that I wasn't clear enough. Unfortunately I was never able to get tpb's OSD to properly work under Suse. However, I have been able to get it running under Gentoo, so all hope is not lost.
Let me explain something first, tpb does have an OSD built in, but the OSD works through XOSD. So you need to install XOSD along with TPB.

You can find XOSD here.

Once you get XOSD installed, set up the config file for tpb /etc/tpbrc
Next as root try running tpb in verbose mode with

tpb -v

every time you press a button you should see a that change reflected on the command line. Post any errors and I'll try to help.

Once all the above is working you need a way to start tpb as a daemon automatically with

tpb -d

I just stuck a link in my KDE autostart folder.

hi sarvinc and thanks for the reply. I got the xosd package and installed but I am not sure what do you mean by setting up the config file /etc/tpbrc Can you be more specific here before going on with the other staff?

regards.
taganu

I'm no longer running any version of Suse so I am going to be of limited help. TPB uses a file called "tpbrc" the complete path is /etc/tpbrc . You can edit this file to match your preferences with any text editor, I prefer vim. There are several options that you can either set or change in the tpbrc file, and there is very through documentation also found in tpbrc.