No brightness control on Acer 4810t

[jim.hitch]

Hi

8.04 all working nice and stable on my new Acer 4810t dual core, but still with some outstanding issues.

I haven't found a way to get the brightness to change at all, am wondering if anyone can help.

Looking around the brightness control could be here:

/proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

and if I try

cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

I get something like

~$ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness
levels: 100 80 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
current: 70

which I've just noticed is controlled by the hotkeys. Unfortunately it has no effect on the brightness. Using the echo command has no effect on it.

There is also

/sys/class/backlight/acer_acpi/brightness

and if I try

cat /sys/class/backlight/acer_acpi/brightness

I get

9

but echo changes nothing.

There is also

/proc/acpi/acer/brightness

and if I try

cat /proc/acpi/acer/brightness

I get

8

but the echo command makes no difference.

Any ideas where I'm going wrong?

Jim

[tastyracer]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

Exactly the same problem with my 4810T using 9.0.4.....the power management utility has no effect on the brightness, neither do the Function keys.

It's a pain because I bought the 4810T for my daughter and want to get her away from MS OS - the full-on brightness is compromising the amazing battery life it has running Vista.

Also my ethernet port won't work (ok in Vista)....does yours?

Steve

[GreyGeek]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

In the list of plasmoid apples (widgets) is one called "Battery Monitor". Install it on your panel.
When you right mouse on it an option dialog appears. One of the options is "Screen Brightness". You can drag a slider to change the brightness of the screen. It works well on my Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E/H notebook.

[tastyracer]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

Thanks for the reply....yes, I have the battery monitor widget and it has a screen brightness slider, but moving it has no effect on the screen brightness. Also changing Power Profiles seems to have no effect either.

[GreyGeek]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

My apologies. I didn't catch that you were running 8.04. I had that problem in 9.04 but the screen brightness slider on the power montior in Karmic works for me.

[jim.hitch]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

Also my ethernet port won't work (ok in Vista)....does yours?

When I tried with 9.04 to start with and noticed the ethernet port wasn't working, which is why I went for 8.04.

I'll keep you posted if I work out the brightness issue.

8.04 is giving me lots of trouble with the CD/DVD drive, I've post here:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...6071.msg194237

you having any trouble with it in 9.04?


Jim

[jim.hitch]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

My apologies. I didn't catch that you were running 8.04. I had that problem in 9.04 but the screen brightness slider on the power montior in Karmic works for me.

I use my machine for work, so don't what to jump into Karmic yet!

EDIT: What's the command that's making it work in Karmic?

Also, was poking around last night and found these:

http://sysphere.org/~anrxc/local/Tra...mate-5320.html

http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/

Which look promising. I'm running 2.6.24, so don't have either acer-wmi or acer_acpi on my system, but will give them a shot when I get a chance. Any comments on these?

Jim

[tastyracer]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

Ah yes, just noticed problems with my optical drive too....haven't fully worked out the triggers yet but load a disc it stops working and disappears from the file manager view (again, all works fine in Vista). I suspect I'm seeing in 9.04 what you are seeing in 8.04 and was wondering too whether this had anything to do with the power-saving feature.

I'm new to this Linux thing....but I really want to make it work as it's fab on my dektops. I was also nervous about trying Karmic, but might give it a go as I'm getting desperate. The acer-wmi/acer_acpi sounds interesting, can't wait to hear how you get on with that!

So, to summarise....issues so far:

no ethernet port
no screen brightness management
optical drive loses mount

Steve

[dibl]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

If you want to test Karmic, with no risk to your existing installation, you can make a Live CD by burning an ISO image of the daily build from here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/daily-live/current/

Karmic is now "feature frozen" and went through a very large upgrade in the past 24 hours, including a new kernel, so you should get a pretty fair representation of what the overall performance is going to look like in the released version -- i.e. networking, optical drive (well, oops, if you're running the Live CD I don't guess you'll be testing K3B on it ... :P ), video, etc.

[jim.hitch]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

Ah yes, just noticed problems with my optical drive too....haven't fully worked out the triggers yet but load a disc it stops working and disappears from the file manager view (again, all works fine in Vista). I suspect I'm seeing in 9.04 what you are seeing in 8.04 and was wondering too whether this had anything to do with the power-saving feature.

I'm new to this Linux thing....but I really want to make it work as it's fab on my dektops. I was also nervous about trying Karmic, but might give it a go as I'm getting desperate. The acer-wmi/acer_acpi sounds interesting, can't wait to hear how you get on with that!

So, to summarise....issues so far:

no ethernet port
no screen brightness management
optical drive loses mount

I agree that it's probably the powersaving feature that's killing the CD/DVD.

If you're using 9.04, what kernal are you using? My guess is that it's high enough to contain acer-wmi/acer_acpi. Have a look.

Jim

[GreyGeek]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

If you want to test Karmic, with no risk to your existing installation, you can make a Live CD by burning an ISO image of the daily build from here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/daily-live/current/

Karmic is now "feature frozen" and went through a very large upgrade in the past 24 hours, including a new kernel, so you should get a pretty fair representation of what the overall performance is going to look like in the released version -- i.e. networking, optical drive (well, oops, if you're running the Live CD I don't guess you'll be testing K3B on it ... :P ), video, etc.

That's what I did. I burned the ISO of the 8/30/09 iso and installed it on a second 40GB partition. Yesterday afternoon I did
sudo apt-get udpate
sudo apt-get upgrade
(and followed those off with "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" just to be sure.

I noticed one problem: apturl did not install because of a typo in the path:
"./usr/......" (leading period) caused it to complain that it couldn't "find the directory or file" and the install of that app failed. A few moments later a new notification of an update to the app appeared, but it failed in the same way. So, I manually installed apturl-kde instead. I used "sudo apt-get -f install" to clean up my cache. This morning, while writing this post, I couldn't remember the exact path and decided to use Synaptic to try and recreate the error. Apparently the app was fixed since yesterday afternoon because it installed fine this morning.

[jim.hitch]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

That's what I did.

And? What's working?

Looking forward to the results.

Jim

[GreyGeek]

Re: No brightness control on Acer 4810t

So far, everything I've tried.

IMO, the weak link is Knetworkmanager. It won't start up till the GUI is up, it is slow to connect, and I've noticed it has a tendency to break the connection while under heavy load, in a strange sort of way. I can use aria2c and establish a 1.7Mb/s download link without problems. However, running SecondLife, while doing battle with an MCM Combat systems battle mech the combination of rapid 3D screen movement, SLVoice thread, a large bandwidth setting and a large cache has caused KNetworkManager to kill my Linsys WRTg5GL wireless router twice. Merely redoing the connection under KNetworkManager won't re-establish the connection. I have to reboot the router AND my PC. So, last night, I installed wicd. I'll find out today how it works.

I occasionally have a "pynotifier" problem, what ever that is, and apport-kde doesn't always run to completing, which leaves a service zombie taking up about 40M of memory each, which I kill enmasse' every so often.

Other than that, Karmic is working very well. The 2.6.31-9 kernel has fully empowered my notebook and resolved all my Intel GM45 video chip image problems with the 2nd screen buffer. Aside from the SL thing, my daily tasks occur without problems. KDE4.3.1 is a JOY to use, and easy as well.