[ltp] Re: T61 brightness/volume

[Alan Wood]

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
>