Anyone using a dock with their laptop?

[suse_tpx60s]

I have a Thinkpad x60s which I dock when at my desk. I'm trying to figure out how the docking is supposed to work in openSUSE11.1. I've configured a docked and undocked profile with the profile manager in YAST. Now when I boot up grub gives me an option to select docked or undocked (by pressing F3).

My question is why doesn't oS automatically recognise that the laptop is docked or not and start up with the applicable profile? If I don't select the profile at boot up then it just starts up in whatever profile was last used which is not correct.

Is this a bug or is something up with my system? Anyone got this working properly?

[jbanister]

I use a dock with my tablet, but it doesn't connect PCI cards, just a keyboard, mouse, power, USB hard drive, and USB Optical Drive. It appears to word fine. I haven't set up profiles and dock & undock w/o warning.

Have you seen these words ?:
Nabble - Linux Thinkpad - Re: What are people using for Dock/Undocking scripts for their X60/61's?

[suse_tpx60s]

Thanks for replying. I only have a keyboard, mouse, usb HDD, monitor and power connected to my dock so similar setup. But you don't have an external monitor?

I use the profiles mainly to set monitor resolution, keyboard type / layout and mouse. What tablet do you have?

You say docking / undocking works fine. Assuming you have a Thinkpad, do you press the undock button on the dock and then pull the lever?

I've seen that thread and it shows that the undocking in particular is not very elegant and could potentially cause corruption to mounted drives.

[jbanister]

My tablet is a Motion Computing J3400. The keyboard and mouse are both
USB type. The mouse is a Belkin F5L016-USB. There's no manufacturer info on the keyboard other than "Made in China." They were what the office supply here in Dutch Harbor, AK had when my preferred, bluetooth, keyboard and mouse/trackball got shut out by bluetooth not working after I switched to Linux. The Motion Computing dock holds the tablet in vertical position, so it acts like a monitor, already. The release button seems to me to be mechanical only. It doesn't notify the tablet of imminent departure.

Could you make a script to run at bootup that checks whether you're docked or not and chooses the appropriate profile?

[suse_tpx60s]

OK, so your set is quite different to mine.

With reference to the script to check the docked state, I thought that's what the profile manager was supposed to do. I'll have to read up on it a little.