I'd really like to configure my nx6310 laptop. I can control my soundcard with amixer and play around with my touchpad with synclient (even accidental tapping can be prevented with syndaemon). The wireless button works ootb in Ubuntu just like all the other special keys (for brightness, numpad, etc). I'd also like to adjust the brightness via the command line, but it doesn't seem to work with vbetool*. At least I can use it to switch my led backlight on/off. A keyboard lock function would be great to have, too, if it's possible to map the Esc key for example as an 'unlock'-key and disable the rest of the keyboard (same principle is used in mobile phones).
* 'sudo vbetool vbefp getbrightness' gives me: Real mode call failed

What I'd really like to know is which commands and config files one needs to know to entirely control laptops. Mapping my special keys and controlling the CPU-frequency would be of special interest to me.

Especially a list of man-pages regarding laptop hardware would be great to have.

Why do I want to know all this? I want to automate certain tasks for my own laptop and for some other guys' notebooks.

Why is this important? Laptops are already outselling desktops (they're cheap, small, light and energy-saving (cheap again)). The good news is that certain hardware parts like the Synaptic Touchpad are built into almost every one of them. Bad news is ... there's plenty of stuff that isn't 'standard', which means trouble for the Linux laptop market share.

Depending on the system, these may be hardware switches, and not software ones that can be controlled (e.g. on my laptop, the brightness is a hardware switch - i.e. it generates no key events, and does not depend on any OS being loaded; whereas the wireless switch is a software one which does generate key events and needs software to do something useful).

Some special keys may not be properly mapped, even if they generate key events. Others generate different types of events (e.g. ACPI events). As long as you can find out which type a key generates and catch it, then you can do whatever you like in response.

There are various daemons around for doing this. laptop-mode-tools (which ties into a kernel feature, also called "laptop mode", and is used to reduce the number of writes to the hard drive while in battery mode) can do this, there are dedicated daemons such as cpufreqd, or even KDE can do it for you.

If you want to do it manually, this can be done through somewhere under /sys (I don't remember where exactly).

Besides the usual suspects (linux-on-laptops, tuxmobil), there really is no dedicated list of hardware for laptops under Linux. Plus, throw in that two different laptops from two different manufacturers that have the same hardware inside (e.g. built on the same reference board from either ATI, Intel, nVidia, Via, etc...) can each have their own quirks, problems, ways of dealing with special keys, etc, which means just knowing the hardware isn't enough.