Ubuntu
gnome-power-manager package

brightness changes rapidly up/down

Bug #44055 reported by Crispin Flowerday
20
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gnome-power-manager (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

This is:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340231

On my IBM x31, brightness is controlled directly by hardware, but g-p-m tries to set it itself, this causes very bad things to happen if you press brightness down twice quickly - the brightness changes very very rapidly up and down for ever more.

Revision history for this message
Olivier Cortès (olive) wrote :

confirmed here on another IBM X31.

Changed in gnome-power-manager:
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Olivier Cortès (olive) wrote :

I also confirm a variant of this bug : if i check "dim the backlight when idle" in "general" properties of "power management", waiting a few minutes to make it happen, the backlight of my IBM X31 starts to blink rapidly and never stops, even i hit some keys or move the mouse.

Only way to get it back is to hit Fn-End *very* quickly, many times to go to *minimum* brightness, then restore full brightness with Fn-Home. Trying to *raise* the brightness while blinking is a bad idea, it doesn"t solve the problem.

Very annoying. Paranoid thoughts make me fear backlight could get out of usage quicker than normal.

Workaround : uncheck «dim backlight when idle» in general properties of G-P-M.

Workaround to original bug : hit Fn-End / Fn-Home very slowly to not make GPM bomb.

Revision history for this message
Johannes Hessellund (osos) wrote :

I can conform this on T42 to.

Revision history for this message
Richard Hughes (richard-hughes) wrote :

Yup, I've fixed this in HAL a few weeks ago (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2006-May/005233.html) and also g-p-m HEAD as these types of laptops are weird and need special casing.

I'll backport the g-p-m fixes into 2-14 now. Daniel, I think you want to grab the updates to src/gpm-brightness.* from CVS, although you'll need the corresponding HAL patch too - this is adding a trivial fdi file.
You'll want to grab fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-laptop-panel-mgmt-policy.fdi from hal CVS and then all this should just work as normal.

Richard.

Revision history for this message
Richard Hughes (richard-hughes) wrote :

Johannes, can you add your lshal to this bug please, as your laptop model won't be covered with the hal patch.

Revision history for this message
Johannes Hessellund (osos) wrote : lshal output

Sure.. no problem.

T42 2374-zep

Revision history for this message
Daniel Silverstone (dsilvers) wrote :

Does this happen with the latest gnome-power-manager package in Dapper? We disabled the brightness controls in g-p-m about a week ago.

Revision history for this message
Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

This was still happening to me last week, but I wasn't upgrading regularly.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3925 2006-05-21 22:30 /var/lib/dpkg/info/gnome-power-manager.list

I haven't seen the problem since then, but it wasn't particularly reproducible.

Revision history for this message
Crispin Flowerday (crispin-flowerday-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

This isn't reproducable for me in dapper, and I can repro this problem on demand.

Revision history for this message
Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

Seems resolved for now, then. We'll get a better fix from upstream later on. Thanks for confirming.

Changed in gnome-power-manager:
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
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