Why radeontool?

[Karl Larsen]

Doug Wyatt wrote:
>
> >Doug Wyatt <dwyatt at sunflower.com> writes:
> >> Yesterday, when I ran 'yum update' on F7 I got two packages
> >> installed for which I can't find a reason (see yum log
> >> excerpt below).
> >>
> >> The two new packages are vbetool and radeontool.  From
> >> what I can find, both used to be part of pm-utils.
> >>
> >> I really don't know about vbetool, maybe it's needed, but
> >> radeontool is described as:
> >>    "radeontool is a hack to save some battery on an
> >>     ATI Radeon Mobility graphics chip. Radeontool can
> >>     turn off and on the backlight and external video
> >>     output."
> >>
> >> But, my platform is a desktop, not a laptop, with a GeForce
> >> 6800 GT video card.
> >>
> >> Using yumex, I tried uninstalling radeontool to see what
> >> depended on it; there were nearly 200 of them and pretty
> >> much none of those were optional. They included most of
> >> the OpenOffice pkgs, Control-Center and system-config-*,
> >> for example.
> >>
> >> Can anyone explain, or even speculate, why radeontool?
> >>
> >
> Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
> > It (and vbetool) were split out of pm-utils.
> >
>
> If I assume that you saw that I noted this, myself, then
> may I assume that you imply that radeontool became a
> dependency simply because its parent package was one, and
> not because it's actually needed?
>
> Is this also because RPM is blind to hardware, beyond CPU
> architecture?
>
> - DAW
>
    I use the theory that those who are in charge of updates do a good 
job. I back this up with the fact that F7 had so many problems I wound 
up writing bug reports. But as the updates started to arrive first one 
and then another problem would disappear. Now I can't find a problem 
except one. My Palm Pilot can't work with F7. Every thing else is great.

    Last week I got the updates to nVidia that would not work. I just 
said OK. This week we got a new kernel and the nVidia updates worked 
fine now. So I can't understand your problem unless you changed 
something that has yum messed up.

-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.