Comment 15 for bug 297213

I think the module is also called only "hdaps" sometimes, at least for me.

FYI, I have a fairly new Thinkpad (T500) and I get this to work with the following steps, not sure which parts need to be put into which ubuntu package to make this available without manual re-compilation:

- compile my own kernel and patch it with one patch for hdaps from http://cache.gmane.org//gmane/linux/drivers/hdaps/devel/1393-001.bin

- compile latest tp-smapi (version 0.40) with adding HDAPS=1 on the make command to enable HDAPS correctly

- install the additional modules provided by this tp-smapi and ensure that any similar modules installed by the kernel itself are removed:

 rm /lib/modules/$KVER/kernel/ubuntu/misc/thinkpad_ec.ko
 rm /lib/modules/$KVER/kernel/ubuntu/misc/tp_smapi.ko
 rm /lib/modules/$KVER/kernel/drivers/hwmon/hdaps.ko

- add the following in a file "/etc/modprobe.d/local" to set the necessarz option
# enable thinkpad_ec
options thinkpad_ec force_io=1

# option to correctly set tilting through hdaps sensor
options hdaps invert=1

then tp-smapi and hdaps works fine for me after loading modules:
 modprobe tp_smapi
 modprobe hdaps