Brightness applet flickers on Toshiba Satellite A105 (A105-S4254)

[David Benjamin]

Binary package hint: hal

The brightness applet now causes the screen to flicker on a Toshiba Satellite A105-S4254. When using the applet, the screen flashes on and off between two brightnesses. Going through it a step at a time shows that the brightness appears to wrap around a bunch and flicker back and forth. (With a switch every 3-4 clicks)

I know the screen is capable of more than two settings because the Fn-keys worked on the Windows side and I can cat from and echo into /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/LCD/brightness to change things. (Although the latter isn't very uniform. I don't remember if the settings are the same as the Windows ones; haven't booted there for a while. Will check sometime later.)
-- For the record, the Fn-keys report Fn-less keycodes in Gutsy, and in Feisty they blanked the screen and made it come back in about half a second with no change in brightness.

When unplugging the AC cord, the screen flickers a ton and then settles on the lower setting. This hurts my eyes a lot. I can work around this by making it only dim the screen by 7%. Except that the dim screen when idle option still makes it flicker, and I'd like it to work.

The brightness applet does not appear to affect /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/LCD/brightness at all.

In Feisty, it didn't work at all.[1]

The contents of /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/LCD/brightness:
levels: 75 35 10 25 35 50 60 75 90 100
current: 100

[1] Actually, the bug may have existed in a form in Feisty as well:

Background: So, when I first installed Feisty, the brightness applet did absolutely nothing. In fact it had a little crossed out sign. I added little scripts in /etc/acpi/{ac,battery}.d to brighten and dim the screen with /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/LCD/brightness and all was well. Reasonably.

Some time later I noticed that it would flicker a bit when I pulled the cord, but I paid little attention to it. It wasn't as bad as the Gutsy default. Also, the little brightness notify thing didn't appear on the screen then. (The popup was what prompted me to play with the brightness applet in Gutsy.)

My guesses are that what changed between the two events is hal, because I at some point enabled feisty-backports and there is a new hal in there. Although, the brightness popup didn't appear in Feisty. I don't know if that's because the brightness applet still didn't work or if the old gnome-power-manager didn't display those. (And doing a downgrade and then an upgrade and so on is kind of annoying.)

(Because of that, and the fact that the brightness applet's source code shows that it's just a dbus frontend to hal, I set the package to hal instead of gnome-power-manager.)

[Noorez (noorez-kassam)]

This also happens on Satellite A100-SK9 for me. I can only get a steady change in brightness by using:

# echo -n "setting" > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

[George Mason (george-porthall)]

I also experience this issue on an Acer Travelmate 5520 with AMD Turion processor and ATI Radeon 1250 gfx.

Further to the description above - all of which occurs on this machine - when running on battery the brightness does change to its lower setting (as specified in the power saving applet) but periodically flickers between bright and dim.

[Edward Steel (eddsteel)]

A very similar problem is now occurring on a macbook, having upgraded to Intrepid, but I did not see the problem on feisty or hardy.

The flicker only occurs on a change of brightness -- either manual or kicked off by gnome power manager.

[Achille (foglie-morte)]

The same for me, on a Samsung Q45, having upgraded to Intrepid Ibex. The problem didn't exist on the previous versions..
The brightness shade on and off.

[Daniel Antony Demski (dranorter)]

This is happening for me on a macbook. It seems it has a wrong idea about the maximum brightness so it wraps around? As I dim the screen I get brightest-darkest-secondbrightest-seconddarkest- etc., or something close to that anyway.

[xteejx (xteejx-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Daniel Antony Demski (dranorter)]

I've had this problem in both Ibex and Jackalope.

[xteejx (xteejx-deactivatedaccount)]

Not a hal bug, changing to gnome-applet, will add notify-osd to this for Jaunty.

[xteejx (xteejx-deactivatedaccount)]

Thanks for the update. Can you follow the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingGNOMEApplets and attach log files to this bug report as separate attachments. Thank you.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.