Re: Dell Media Direct button

["Vesa Jääskeläinen" <chaac@nic.fi>]

Robert Millan 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?

Nah... Do a module to query for it and if it is there then use scripting
to do alternative path within script. Much better and more convenient.
And you can use script to increment default variable if needed :)