[ltp] Re: T61 brightness/volume

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

just following up on my own continuing saga of getting brightness and 
volume to work as expected on my T61.
I have upgraded to kernel 2.6.24.4 and bios 2.0.10
I also installed the 1.0.16 version of alsa.  I should warn anyone trying 
this that the newer alsa modules do not work with the conexant HSF modem 
driver, so you have to pick which one you want...

Sound:  the new alsa driver does give me a new master channel.  however 
this does not seem to have any effect on how the volume keys work.  mute 
events, which work, are not reflected in alsa mixer settings, and volume 
change events still don't work.  I changed the default mixer channel in 
gconf from PCM to Master and this had no effect.

Brightness: remains unchanged now that I am running the .17 version of 
thinkpad_acpi.  brightness_enable is now an opton which, when on, creates 
the functional /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness interface, but the keys themselves 
don't get mapped to that interface even though they do show up in tpb.

I'm still curious what the "right" way to handle this should be.  should I 
be mapping volume key events to alsa mixer events through acpi or some 
other interface?  should I be mapping brightness acpi events to the proc 
interface or to xbacklight?  or is this going to work "out of the box" with 
some coming changes I don't know about?
-alan

On Thu, 31 Jan 2008, Alan Wood wrote:

> ok,
> a follow-up on my own post from last week:
> 1.  I downloaded xbacklight and it works to change brightness.  of course I 
> could always change brightness from the command line by echoing up/down to 
> /proc/acpi/bin/brightness so I don't see how this helps much.  it does 
> provide a smoother brightness changing effect but it does not provide the OSD 
> with tpb that the other method does.  I decidedly do not like using xmodmap 
> to map the fn-home/end keys to this though as I feel it should be a system 
> event, not an X event.  any news on how/when this will get fixed?
>
> 2.  as for volume, I saw a couple of posts and verified that the mute button 
> does work when acpi_osi="!Linux" but does not work when acpi_osi="Linux". 
> however the hardware up/down volume buttons don't work at all except to 
> unmute.  I saw a post about an alsa master channel being added to the 
> intel_hda driver, is that supposed to fix this?  is there any way to map the 
> existing keys to the PCM channel?
> I also don't understand why the mute button and then vol up/down produces OSD 
> events in tpb but just the vol up/down buttons do not....
>
> btw, I upgraded to BIOS 2.09 and kernel 2.6.23.14-107.fc8 (while downgrading 
> thinkpad_acpi to .16) with no effects.
> -alan
>
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, Alan Wood wrote:
>
>> I've been perusing the list for a couple of months now for help with 
>> lingering issues with my Thinkpad T61 (14" widescreen, Intel GMA).  I just 
>> upgraded from BIOS 1.26 to 2.07 but that seemed to have no effect.
>> I've seen lots of people who have similar prolems and attempted nearly all 
>> the solutions to no avail.  I'm running Fedora 8, kernel 2.6.23.9-85.fc8
>> 
>> First Brightness:
>> out of the box, brightness controls (fn-home, fn-end) work fine in the Grub 
>> menu.  Once the kernel is booted the story is different.
>> I've tried the stock thinkpad_acpi that came with F8 (0.16) and I compiled 
>> thinkpad_acpi 0.18-20071203 for comparison.  both gave me the same results.
>> Namely, I get the /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness interface.  echoing commands to 
>> that works fine (TPB even pops up when I issue brightness changes from the 
>> cli).
>> However when I use the fn keys to control brightness I get a different 
>> result.  Under X (KDE, kmilo disabled), the contents of 
>> /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness changes accordingly and the TPB osd shows up, but 
>> the brightness does not actually change.  In the console obviously TPB does 
>> not show up but the proc interface shows a change despite the screen not 
>> changing brightness.
>> I have played with the brightness_enable and brightness_mode options for 
>> thinkpad_acpi but to no avail.  the only difference comes in the dmesg 
>> output for insmod.  auto gives me:
>> thinkpad_acpi: CMOS NVRAM (13) and EC (0) do not agree on display 
>> brightness level
>> while defined modes give me:
>> thinkpad_acpi: detected a 16-level brightness capable ThinkPad
>> 
>> 
>> with sound my issues are slightly different.  I disabled pulseaudio 
>> entirely and made sure that gconf saw PCM as the default mixer (using 
>> alsa).  still the hardware keys don't do much.
>> again I get the /proc/acpi/ibm/volume interface.  I can echo commands in 
>> there and they both stick and cause TPB to show an osd but have no effect 
>> on actual sound ouput.  pressing the hardware buttons has no effect 
>> whatsoever now, but with my original install the mute button did at least 
>> register (not sure which changed caused that to stop working).
>> 
>> 
>> I read the kernel thread 
>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/591037/focus=591045
>> for insight but did't find anything much agreed upon.
>> wondering what the status was on these things.  are we just waiting on 
>> fixes from Lenovo?  are there workarounds that make these things work 
>> correctly (say, capturing acpi events?).  is there something I'm missing?
>> -alan
>> 
>