Do you own a ThinkPad? Good! Does it have the ThinkLight? Good! Then this post might interest you!
I just wrote a KDE Telepathy plugin that blinks the ThinkLight when you get an incoming message. Sounds almost useless, isn’t? Maybe not.
I found a good use case for it: sometime you could be away from keyboard, but near your ThinkPad (e.g. studying), the screen goes black, sounds are off, but you see the ThinkLight blinking - you got a message!
To enable it you just have to fetch the source code, build and install as usual with CMake.
There’s just an annoyance at the moment: you need write permission over /proc/acpi/ibm/light. I’m looking for a solution for this, but found nothing if not changing that file permissions manually. Any idea?
There’s also a tool, thinkalert (mirror), which allows to turn on/off the ThinkLight without being root by using suid. If you prefer this way, you can fetch the code from the thinkalert branch instead.
Have fun!
Tags: kde, linux