OSDev.org

Hello

I just wanted to know if a laptop's keyboard was handled differently than a regular keyboard

Yesterday I burnt my O/S on a CD-ROM and tested it
I works on : Virtual PC, Qemu, BOCHS, my desktop gaming PC (only one year old), another old desktop computer (about 800 Mhz to give you an idea of its age)

But on my laptop I don't get any keyboard input

It's a bit hard to debug this (wasting a CD each time >.>) so should I worry about this or is it just some kind of special hardware?

Thank you

You could try booting from USB the save burning cd's all the time for testing (unless you're specifically testing the cd-booting part).

I'm using a pair of Dell Latitudes, D830, D620 and their keyboards work perfectly via the std. 64h/60h ports. This includes the laptop kybd as well as the usb one plugged in pre-boot.

Your laptop might have an USB style keyboard (and touchpad), rather than a PS/2 one, and there are some actions that disable PS/2 emulation should it be enabled (which usually is a bios setting).

And please do yourself a favor and buy rewritable CDs. There's no need to unnecessarily waste CDs

And please do yourself a favor and buy rewritable CDs. There's no need to unnecessarily waste CDs

Or netboot - even easier

Combuster wrote:And please do yourself a favor and buy rewritable CDs. There's no need to unnecessarily waste CDs

Don't worry it was only the second time I burnt a CD
I usually trust emulators but from time to time I want to check if it works on real hardware

The problem with RW is that:
1) I don't have any, and I have a huge number of regular blank CDs
2) I'm not sure if my unstable implementation of the CD-ROMs filesystem is working with CD-RW (I think it's using level 3 or something like that, I didn't read much about it for the moment)

The worse part is that this laptop is the one I'm using to compile my O/S (I'm developping on Windows but using SSH/Samba for compilation)
So netboot won't help...


But the good news is that it's working
I disabled the BIOS setting "Enable legacy USB support" (confusing name) and everything is ok =)
Thanks

Since the subject of this thread is "Laptop", I guess we can talk about stuff other than keyboards, right? I was just curious what differences do you usually have in laptops, besides the ACPI-related stuff which I'm sure everyone is aware of. I did hear that some OSes don't work right on laptops so I'm guessing there's more to it. Any ideas?

Hi,

Love4Boobies wrote:Since the subject of this thread is "Laptop", I guess we can talk about stuff other than keyboards, right? I was just curious what differences do you usually have in laptops, besides the ACPI-related stuff which I'm sure everyone is aware of. I did hear that some OSes don't work right on laptops so I'm guessing there's more to it. Any ideas?

Probably the biggest thing that worries me about laptops is docking stations. While the OS is running, the user puts their laptop into the docking station and suddenly there's a floppy drive, CD, printer, a different keyboard and a different monitor; and the OS is meant to detect this, auto-configure all the new hardware and bring it all up to speed (potentially including telling applications that the video mode they were using isn't supported on the new monitor and can't be used anymore).


Cheers,

Brendan

Brendan wrote:Hi,

Love4Boobies wrote:Since the subject of this thread is "Laptop", I guess we can talk about stuff other than keyboards, right? I was just curious what differences do you usually have in laptops, besides the ACPI-related stuff which I'm sure everyone is aware of. I did hear that some OSes don't work right on laptops so I'm guessing there's more to it. Any ideas?

Probably the biggest thing that worries me about laptops is docking stations. While the OS is running, the user puts their laptop into the docking station and suddenly there's a floppy drive, CD, printer, a different keyboard and a different monitor; and the OS is meant to detect this, auto-configure all the new hardware and bring it all up to speed (potentially including telling applications that the video mode they were using isn't supported on the new monitor and can't be used anymore).


Cheers,

Brendan

I've never actually seen someone use a docking station though... and I never seen them anywhere but online.. so isn't it true that they are becoming much less popular? And yes, this is very worrysome.. the different monitor bit seems the hardest part assuming everything else used firewire or usb (or e-Sata) which btw, has anyone gotten native SATA speed support built into their OS yet?

The different monitor part can't be any different from changing resolution on the current monitor...

Except wouldn't it be like using a different video card, or using the other port on a multi-monitor video card?

Your application shouldn't know what video card is used. It should use the OS-provided graphics API, which should take care of it.

<automatic counter for personal-taste-argument>
Your application should know what video card is used, so it can take advantage of its capabilities.

Combuster wrote:<automatic counter for personal-taste-argument>
Your application should know what video card is used, so it can take advantage of its capabilities.

Isn't the whole point of DirectX and OpenGL to create a transparent API that will take advantage of any video card designed with them in mind?

Ever programmed with OpenGL extensions or nonstandard DirectX features?

<rant>
DirectX provides you with a huge struct containing indices and bitfields that tell you everything that both DX and your video card supports. There are a dozen things that need to be done differently on different pieces hardware. In fact, my 3D game I need 950 lines of code to have a good chance to get working output. And then I'm not even yet displaying things.

Then consider OpenGL, which has a wretched history of ATI and NVidia repeatedly providing different extensions for the same functionality in the hopes games will only work on one of the two.

Consistent interface, you bet. Basically you're writing 4 graphics engines. One for NVidia crap, one for ATI crap, one for intel crap, and one for worse crap
</rant>

On the other hand, a single interface using the greatest common denominator doesn't work because that'd be equivalent to the empty set.

Craze Frog wrote:Your application shouldn't know what video card is used. It should use the OS-provided graphics API, which should take care of it.

I wasn't talking about an application or letting it know what hardware there is, I was talking about the OS and letting it know what hardware there is. In order for the OS to properly allow applications to deal with the switch, the OS itself needs to properly deal with the switch. Most (but probably not all) hobby OSs aren't yet to the point where they can deal with that. Even if they can handle switching to a video card that was there since boot up, what about one that was added after boot? And what about other hardware? It'll take a lot of work to get to the point of supporting that kind of thing.