Laptop dims on startup even on AC

When is the screen dimmed? On boot, or when you log in?

The screen is dimmed when I log in. It is also dimmed twice when I deattach the AC plug, once on deattachment and then again after 1 second. When I reattach the AC plug it is dimmed up a bit and then down again after 1 second. Thus it never reaches the full level, so I have to manually set the brightness to full every time.

Before the updates my system just dimmed down once after deattachment and completely up again after reattachment.

Does the slider in the ac section of the power preferences go from minimum brightness to maximum brightness, or do you need to use the keys to increase it to maximum? What hardware is this?

The slider does not go to the maximum of brightness, the last three steps I have to increase manually. The laptop is a Zepto Znote 4200 (www.zepto.dk), a rescinned Compal CL56 with ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128 MB graphics.

Do you have a /proc/acpi/asus/brn file? If so, can you try echoing different values from 0-20 into it?

That path does not exist, neither does /proc/acpi/asus/. Here is my /proc/acpi:

ac_adapter dsdt fan power_resource sony wmi
alarm embedded_controller hotkey processor thermal_zone
battery event info sbs video
button fadt poolsize sleep wakeup

"brn" does not exist in any path.

Does the brightness slider change the brightness at all? Could you please attach the output of the

lshal

command?

Yes, both on battery and AC the slider is able to modify the brightness, but I still have to use the keys on my keyboard to get the brightness up completely. This I did not need to do earlier on Dapper.

The slider is, however, able to turn the brightness down to its correct minimum.

My lshal output is in lshal.log

Ok, I think I see the problem.

--
Matthew Garrett | <email address hidden>

hal describes the omnibook as having 8 brightness levels, though it sounds like there should be 10 or 11.

That sounds very plausible, can I change this manually? Or will you include this in an update?

It needs source-code modification, I'm afraid. I can try to do an upload
later on.

--
Matthew Garrett | <email address hidden>

Should be fixed in hal 0.5.7-1ubuntu16

Thank you, that was very fast. This is by fare the most effective bug correcting I have ever experienced! A great plus for Ubuntu!

I will report back, when the update becomes available and I have installed it.

Just got the update, and the problem is solved. Thank you very much for your help.

hove99,

can you please do a 'cat /proc/omnibook/lcd' and post the result here? It seems that this fix, broke my hal! I believe we use the same module (omnibook) but have different hardware.

Thanks,
Matteo

Hi MatteoZandi

I'm using edgy now, and it seems that this file does not exist:

me@me:~$ cat /proc/omnibook/lcd
cat: /proc/omnibook/lcd: No such file or directory

Regards

> cat: /proc/omnibook/lcd: No such file or directory

Does the brightness slider work?

can you do a 'lshal | grep laptop_panel' and post the result?
Thanks

Patch "28-fix-omnibook-brightness-levels.patch: Omnibooks have 11 brightness levels, not 8." broke my hal, see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392022.

It is not true that omnibook have 11 brightness level and not 8, it can be both.

Omnibook module, if compiled with kernel >= 2.6.19 correctly creates

matteo@burnt:~$ ls /sys/class/backlight/omnibook/
actual_brightness brightness max_brightness power subsystem uevent

this will be used by hal (I guess beyond version 0.5.9) to get max_brightness of the device, the portion of code that the patch modified will be dropped (see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2006-October/006317.html)

In my opinion, you can skip that patch, thanks for all your work, I hope this helped.
Matteo

It is not true that omnibook have 11 brightness level and not 8, it can be both. The released patch broke hal for those who have 8 brightness levels.

Hi,
I am the new de-facto maintainer of the "omnibook" kernel module
I confirm that the number of brightness levels can the 8 or 11 depending on the laptop model.
Old (before august 2006) versions of the module always assumed it was 11.
This issue is fixed in svn as max level is:
-printed in /proc/omnibook/lcd (ex: 'LCD brightness: 5 (max value: 7)' )
-exported to the backlight class device interface for access via sysfs
HAL needs either to use the sysfs interface or to take into account the max level exported in the /proc file.
However due to lack of hardware documentation I still need to know what is the actual max brightness level for each supported laptop models.
Anybody who hit this bug should contact me so I can update the hardware database of the module. Thanks.

Thanks to Danny Kukawka, this bug is fixed in hal 0.5.9, see

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=commit;h=f92db4967e050bbecd5775802fb6ffb7c963958b

wich I guess will be shipped with gutsy.

Matteo

Fixed upstream.