I got the power!

Actaully, it’s more like ‘I got the PowerMate!’ but it’s not as catchy of a phrase, I know. I picked up the device while I was in DC last month, seeing how neat the device looked, how well it worked and how much of a sucker I am for little gadgets. I plugged it into the MBP when I was in DC and it worked fine, no problems, now, I wanted to get it working at the office on my linux workstation, but what tool to use? After looking a number of options, I decided to give Gizmo a try and its’s working well in Ubuntu, right ‘out of the box’.

To get the driver to compile I did have to add some new packages

apt-get install python python-dev libasound2-dev xosd-bin 
xmms-osd-plugin libxosd-dev xmms-dev libxxf86vm-dev

and then confnigured the it with the options

--disable-bmp --disable-lirc

After that the source built fine and with a simple

 gizmod &

I was able to control the mater volume from X (with a nice OSD) and even the mute worked. Also, the blue glow at the base seems to be responding to CPU load. Cool. It’s a neat little driver. I’ll have to setup some startup sctrips for it or something to get it to automatically load, but other then that it’s all good! Looks like i’m also going to have to get another one for home!