Thinklight

From LinuxSwords Wiki

I am using my thinklight to notify me for new mails in my inbox and for my instant-messaging program gaim. I do this because I don not like the system default beep sounds and to be honest, I do not like notifying sounds at all. It disturbs me while I am listening music or I am watching a movie on my laptop

I have been asked by Alex to share the script to do this, so here it is

To set the script up on a linux-box we need two things

  1. A script to address the thinklight device
  2. The thinklight is owned by root, so we have to take care that any user is able to run it

1. The script

The thinklight device is located on /proc/acpi/ibm/light. This is an ubuntu-path, other distrution should have a similar path as well.

To turn the light on at the cmd-line we open up a shell and type:

   echo on > /proc/acpi/ibm/light

if you are root. If not use sudo in front of the command. I will assume you are root for rest of this post.

To turn the light off simply type:

   echo off > /proc/acpi/ibm/light

This is what we use in the script. Open a new file, lett us call it blink in a texteditor (gvim/vim/gedit/whatever) and type

   #!/bin/bash
   # script for blinking my thinklight
   # needs to be run by root
   # depends on /usr/bin/seq

   if [ $# -ne 2 ] ; then
     echo "usage: $0 <NbrOfBlinks> <Frequency>"
     exit 1
   fi

   NBR_OF_BLINKS=$1
   FREQUENCY=$2
   THINKLIGHT=/proc/acpi/ibm/light

   for i in `seq $NBR_OF_BLINKS`
   do
    echo on > $THINKLIGHT
    sleep $FREQUENCY
    echo off > $THINKLIGHT
    sleep $FREQUENCY
   done

Now make the script executable with

   chmod 755 <blink>

and run it (as root) with some parameters

   blink 3 0.1

This will blink 3 times with an interval of 0.1 seconds

2. Runnable as normal user

Now place the script named blink somewhere in your PATH, where your system will find it, like /usr/local/bin/ Now become root and edit the sudoers-file with visudo

Go to the last line and add

   <username> ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD:/usr/local/bin/blink

where <username> is your username. Save the file and exit.

You should now be able to run the script without a password with

   sudo /usr/local/bin/blink 3 0.1

Finished! You can place last codesequence in a script and call it from whatever application you want. I am calling this script for my emails and instant messaging using 2 different frequencies. I do not use more because that is all I need and I do not want to turn my linux-box into a disco!!