Ive got Fedora 32 installed on this system. The advice below may work on other distributions. I’d be happy to do more of these if anyone wanted to throw their a few toughpads my way.
The brightness controls in gnome 3 / Fedora 32 do not work out of the box. These instructions have also been tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
You need to create file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf and place this in file:
Section "Device"
Identifier "card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
This will create an additional backlight directory in /sys/class/backlight . At this point you might find there are two possible backlights, ‘panasonic’ and ‘intel_backlight’
The nexts step was to blacklist the ‘panasonic_laptop’ kernel module. This ensured that the gnome 3 brightness/contrast functionality would find ONLY the intel_backlight backlight controls and work correctly.
I achieved this by creating a file in /etc/modprobe.d/panasonic-backlist.conf
blacklist panasonic_laptop
If you want these changes to take effect immediately run the command
rmmod panasonic_laptop
And restart the X session by logging in and out.
There should only be a single directory in /sys/class/backlight and the gnome brightness controls should work correctly.
I’m interested in building a dock for this laptop. There are a lot of docks availabe for it, some as expensive as 1.5k, which are well beyond the acceptable price range that I’m willing to pay for a dock.
I’m going to do some research on the systems pins, and then find out what I can build that will be a suitable dock.
| PIN | | Description |
|-----+---------+---------------------+
| 01 | Shield | |
| 02 | | |
| 03 | | |
| 04 | GRND | |
| 05 | 16V | Supply (for dock ?) |
| 06 | 16V | |
| 07 | 16V | |
| 08 | 5V | Supply for usb ? |
| 09 | 5V | |
| 10 | 5V | |
| 11 | GRND | |
| 12 | D- | USB D- |
| 13 | D+ | USB D+ |
| 14 | GRND | |
| 15 | TX+ | ETHERNET TX+ |
| 16 | TX- | ETHERNET TX- |
| 17 | GRND | |
| 18 | RX + | ETHERNET RX+ |
| 19 | RX- | ETHERNET RX- |
| 20 | GRND | |
| 21 | | |
| 22 | SHORT ? | |
| 23 | | |
| 24 | | |
|-----|---------|---------------------|
All of these are unconfirmed, please leave me a note if you can confirm any of these.
From what I read the MK1 to MK3 have the same pinout.
I have to assume that the system can also be charged through the dock, I just dont know what pins.
The front facing buttons on the toughpad mostly worked out of the box. I had done
Currently have only A1 workin A2 is not working. I’ve started chronicaling my investigation.
Status: working
Status: working (Looks like its working.. not sure what it sends)
Status: working (screen doesn’t rotate, not sure what it sends)
Status: working (This can power off system)