[ltp] T61 brightness control - partial solution

[Micha]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:46:12 +0100
Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 08:47:03PM +0000, Jimmy Wu wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> You mean that brightness works out of the box on an fresh sid install using
> pure Xfce4? What is your graphic card (intel or nvidia)?
> 
> Cheers,

For me with t61 + nvidia graphics works out of the box with no problem, debian
unstable. Not a fresh install though. Network manager has been completely
broken for me for some time now. I may try a clean install to see if it helps
things. I was thinking of completely killing the windows partition that I
haven't booted into once since I installed debian.

I have tpd installed which shows the bar for the brightness. It seems to be
polling the proc interface for the audio since if I echo a value in there it
shows the bar but it refuses to catch the audio keys. I do get them as key
events into X that I have routed to amixer. There is a speaker switch to mute
but it causes crackling sounds on mute/unmute. proc settings also work but have
root write permissions only and I haven't found how to change that. I think
that initially the audio behaved as hardware keys but either a software or bios
update changed that, don't remember which.

I have read on some mail group that someone managed to get hibernation to work
with nvidia using dummy xserver. I didn't try that one yet, other methods
didn't work for me. Suspend ram works, although the machine wakes up if I put
pressure near the power leds, need to take it for warranty work on that.