Re: Dell Media Direct button

[Colin D Bennett]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:12:59 +0200
Robert Millan <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:57:22AM +0200, Per Öberg wrote:
> > Hi
> > 
> > Some laptops, e.g., from Dell have a special button that they use to
> > boot a special embedded OS for media only instead of the ordinary
> > OS.
> > 
> > For my Dell XPS1330M I can determine if the Media button was
> > pressed by first writing 0xf9 to port 0x70 and then testing bit
> > 0x08 of port 0x71.
> > 
> > It would be really nice if such a test could be enabled in grub so
> > that grub can go directly to a specific menu alternative without
> > showing the gui if the media button was pressed.
> > 
> > Is this interesting? I'd like to contribute but I don't know where
> > to start.
> 
> Sounds interesting, but this needs some thought on how to design it.
> 
> I suppose what you want is change the 'default' variable.  Perhaps
> increase it by 1?  But then, where do you do this?  grub_machine_init
> is too early as 'default' hasn't been set yet.
> 
> Maybe we could have a global 'int default_offset' variable that is
> initialized in grub_machine_init and later on used by normal.mod?

If I pressed the "Media Direct" button, I would also want to have a
timeout of 0, since by pressing the Media Direct button instead of the
power button, I've already indicated which entry I want to boot, and
there is no need to show the menu -- unless, perhaps, we decided to
show a different "media" menu... so hopefully giving all the power to
the grub.cfg script would be enough to make all this possible.

Regards,
Colin

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