October 9th, 2005
Those of you with certain IBM laptops should be well aware of the cool feature that parks your hard drive spindle if a shock is detected. For those who don’t know about the feature, watch a video. Actually watch it even if you don’t care about any of this as it’s quite funny.
However up until a few months ago there was no Linux support for the Active Protection System, which was quite disappointing considering IBM are normally good on the Linux support front.
Well, while trying to get wireless working on my R51, I stumbled across several pages detailing headway in providing a kernel patch and some basic userspace tools to get the APS partially working. Currently parking the spindle has not yet been achieved, but data can be read from the device, and has been put to some interesting uses. Have a look at Robert Love’s blog for a Super Monkey Ball type tilting game that responds to the orientation of your laptop. Hopefully they’ll manage to get the APS fully working on Linux soon!