Original screen brightness not restored after inactivity with "dim display when idle" when running on battery.

[Chris Lasher]

In GNOME Power Management Settings, one can set "Dim display when idle". When this option is checked, and the user allows for a period of inactivity, the screen will dim. When running on battery, however, after user activity (e.g., input from the keyboard, touchpad, or other input device), the screen is not restored to its original brightness state, but instead remains dimmed.

Bug #357107 and this bug may be related, since this may have to do with storage of brightness settings.

[Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33)]

I think this is the same bug as https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/mactel-support/+bug/357107 or is at least related.

[Scott Howard (showard314)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Karmic Koala. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/. Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Brad Bowman (launchpad-bereft)]

Does the "use ambient light to adjust LCD brightness" option in the Power Management,
General tab effect this behaviour?

[xteejx (xteejx)]

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!

[Matthew Nuzum (newz)]

This bug also affects me on my Dell Latitude D430 running Lucid as of Feb 22 2010.

When I'm working I set brightness to 100%. Using the keyboard shortcuts there are 8 possible values of brightness: 0% (progress bar gone) to 100% (progress bar full) with 6 steps in between.

If I set brightness to 100% and then let the computer go idle while on battery it dims to a very low level. Then when I use the computer I expect that the brightness will go to 100% again but instead it goes to the fourth step (three above 0). I have to press the brighten keyboard shortcut four times to get the screen back to 100% brightness.

I do not have an option for ambient light in the gnome power manager (but I do have an ambient light sensor). Covering the sensor seems to affect how many times I have to use the keyboard shortcut to get back to 100% brightness. Doing a quick test, with the ambient light sensor covered I had to use the keyboard shortcut 8 times to get to full brightness.

[FreeFri (freefri)]

This bug affects me in Ubuntu 9.10 beta1. My netbook is an Asus Eee Pc 1000H. when it is being powered by battery, i decided to put the screen brightness for example: 80%. If I wait a minute, the computer enters the idle session and the screen brightness is reduced to 50%. Then press a key and recovers the brightness of the screen, but not the original brightness (80%), recovering 100%.
If, to save much battery i decided to put the screen brightness for example: 10%. After idle session and the screen brightness is increases to 50%.

[FreeFri (freefri)]

This does not happen if you do not use the battery on AC power work properly

[FreeFri (freefri)]

You can see an example of this bug in http://vimeo.com/11560574
   In min 0:14 I change to the maximum brightness
   In min 1:31 the session is idle and the screen goes dark
   In min 1:35 I move the mouse, then, the session is not idle an the brightness of the display changes to 50%, but in min 0:14 the brightness was up to 100%
   In min 0:56 I change to the maximum brightness

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner.
There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test the current Ubuntu version (10.10). If you can test it, and it is still an issue, we would appreciate if you could upload updated logs by running apport-collect <bug #>, and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Robotron (robotron)]

I have exactly the same problem as described with Ubuntu 10.10 running on Lenovo x201i.

[David Winn (dewinn)]

I too have this issue on a new Lenovo T410 with the nVidia 3100 running 10.04 LTS 64bit.

[Andrew Sofie (andrew-synthesize)]

I have seen the exact seem issue on 5+ netbooks running 10.10. All have latest stable patches.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

I didn't have the privileges to do this at the time, so marking this as Triaged. Thank you for the information, there should be enough here for a developer to take a look at it, so it has been marked as Triaged. Thank you again for reporting this to us.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Actually, this has previously been reported. It is not the exact same problem, but it IS about the fact that gpm doesn't stored saved brightness settings, so marking this bug as a duplicate of bug #35223.