Re: /dev/thinkpad keeps disappearing

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:40:12 +0100, Pollywog wrote:
> The bigger problem is that /dev/thinkpad disappears after reboots.

If you have udev then the file should reappear when you load the thinkpad
module.

You can set up a Linux system so that an application's attempt to open a
device file results in a module being automatically loaded.  On a udev
system, however, device files do not exist until modules are loaded, so
auto-loading by the latter mechanism is not possible.  (devfs was better
than udev in this respect: because it lived in the kernel it could detect
attempts to open non-existent device files and could load modules and
create the device files just-in-time.)

If you do this:

$ sudo mknod /dev/thinkpad c 10 170

then running tpctl will cause the thinkpad module to be auto-loaded.

Alternatively you can add 'thinkpad' to /etc/modules.

You should install the latest version (5.8-3) of thinkpad-base in order
to get the /etc/udev/permissions.d/thinkpad.permissions file. 

-- 
Thomas Hood