[ltp] T61 brightness control - partial solution

[Jimmy Wu]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 3:42 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj@comcast.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:30:17 -0600
>  Pablo Vera <pvera@vercan.com> dijo:
>
>
>  > I have a new T61 on which I installed Ubuntu Gutsy 64 bits.  Almost
>  > everything is working perfect, I've been able to do everything I need
>  > (well except open one specific  web page from my bank that uses a Java
>  > applet that doesn't initializes).
>  >
>  > But there are two small things that doesn't work: the volume and
>  > brightness controls.  The OSD pops up and I see how they are updated by
>  > the press of the buttons, but neither volume, nor brightness changes.

I have a T61 running Debian Sid. The Fn+Home and Fn+End work in that
they change the screen brightness, though nothing pops up to indicate
the current level. I counted 16 levels of brightness on the way down
from max to lowest. The buttons worked out of the box on a Debian
install.  I have the thinkpad_acpi module loaded, but from what I read
in the documentation, the brightness keys are handled by the firmware
rather than the module itself.


>  I have a T61 and had the same problems. I never need the brightness
>  controls because I always want it on the highest setting anyway, which
>  is where it is by default. [...]

It's useful when you're on battery to save power.

> [...] I did find, however, that the volume
>  controls work if you upgrade the BIOS.

Hmm - I should try that. That's at the hardware level right? If you
have instructions that you could post, that would be great. Right now,
the way I have sound work is to have my desktop environment (in my
case xfce4) capture the XFree86AudioRaiseVolume and
XFree86AudioLowerVolume keys and then trigger amixer.

Also, I have my keyboard model in xorg.conf set to thinkpad instead of
pc104, which I believe is the default.  I am not sure if that changes
the brightness or volume keys (probably not), but it does assign the
XFree86Forward and XFree86Back keysyms to the two web browser keys by
the arrow keys, which pc104 did not.

-- 
Jimmy Wu
Registered Linux User #454138
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments