display brightness asus; function keys not working

[Daniel Schmitt]

I just newly installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my Asus B80A Laptop. There I got a problem with the display brightness setting. During the bootup the display gets a lot darker and when I enter the Desktop the function keys only work between an almost black setting and a very dark one. With the brightness applet all brightness settings can be accessed ()though there is heavy flickering involving during the change of brightness)

[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.

[Stefan Kriwanek (Divan) (dev-stefankriwanek)]

This happens on my Asus x5dij, too.

However, i think the issue with the brightness-keys has nothing to do with gnome-power-manager, since I incidentally discovered a workaround (see #399675).
Also, setting the brightness by writing to /sys/devices/virtual/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness works perfectly.

I assume the flickering occurs because before every brightness change the value is first set to the darkest and then to the desired one.

I'll soon test it with an karmic alpha live cd.

[Stefan Kriwanek (Divan) (dev-stefankriwanek)]

On karmic alpha 2 the flickering is the same. The brightness keys are reacting but both keys randomly do nothing (but flickering) or switch with the following behaviour:
Using the "brightness up" key I randomly get the darkest or the almost-brightest setting.
With the "brightness down" key I get the brightest or almost-darkest setting.
The OSD always displays one of those values belonging to the keys, but not necessarily the current one.

After booting I get an error window saying "Internal error - failed to initialize HAL"

[Scott Howard (showard314)]

Thanks for testing. So there was no difference between Karmic and Jaunty's performance? It's still best to do debugging in Karmic since the developers would be able to get fixes into the development release.

There are some additional debugging steps we can do to identify this problem.
First, follow the Troubleshooting instructions at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Hotkeys/Troubleshooting

If it confirms that the bug is not in the kernel's handling of the hotkeys, then we can use:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingGNOMEPowerManager
specifically the command:
1) dbus-monitor --session "type='signal',interface='org.freedesktop.PowerManagement.Backlight'"
2) change brightness with hotkeys
3) report the output here

and the commands:
1) type the following into the terminal:
killall gnome-power-manager
gnome-power-manager --verbose --no-daemon
2) change the brightness hotkeys
3) report the output here

[Scott Howard (showard314)]

The workaround mentioned in Divan's comment is:
A workaround is unloading/reloading the "video" kernel module, but
after this the brightness-changing-OSD doesn't appear anymore and I
guess there may be other issues, at least it's not the elegant way ;)

For developer reference, see bug #369777

[Scott Howard (showard314)]

Since reloading the kernel video module fixed this bug, I've added "linux (Ubuntu) to this bug report. Which video card and driver are you using? Your video card info can be found in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

I'm unfamiliar with kernel level debugging/fixing, so if a member of the kernel team can take a look at this I'd appreciate it.

[Scott Howard (showard314)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 224636, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Stefan Kriwanek (Divan) (dev-stefankriwanek)]

This bug isn't a duplicate of bug #224636. The laptop mentioned there has NVIDIA graphics and an ambient light sensor that messes up with brightness settings. The asus x5dij and b80a have no such sensor and use the Intel GMA 4500MHD.

Therefore I unlinked the bugs. I posted some debugging information erroneously in #224636 that I'll repeat below.
The conclusion I draw from them:
1. The bug is a kernel / video driver bug and has got nothing to do with gnome-power manager. (It occurs with kubuntu as well)
2. It still occurs with Karmic Alpha 2
Also theres the output of dmidecode, lspci and uname attached.
As Scott did yesterday, I'd appreciate if a member of the kernel team can take a look at this bug again, since we're now sure it's a kernel bug.

Now the debugging information (only the hotkey-troubleshooting, not for gnome-power-manager, see #224636):

Gnome-power-manager and gnome-settings-daemon are killed.

Keyevents reported by xev | sed -n 's/^.*state \([0-9].*\), keycode *\([0-9]\+\) *\(.*\), .*$/keycode \2 = \3, state = \1/p' :

keycode 232 = (keysym 0x1008ff03, XF86MonBrightnessDown), state = 0x0
keycode 232 = (keysym 0x1008ff03, XF86MonBrightnessDown), state = 0x0

keycode 233 = (keysym 0x1008ff02, XF86MonBrightnessUp), state = 0x0
keycode 233 = (keysym 0x1008ff02, XF86MonBrightnessUp), state = 0x0

(In both cases the two events are reported instantly, not on key down / key up.)

This is before reloading video module. After that xev doesn't report keyevents anymore.

acpi_listen events are strange before reloading:

key brightness up produces always (except for the counter, of course):
video LCDD 00000086 00000000
hotkey ATKD 00000011 0000007e

and brightness down:
video LCDD 00000087 00000000
hotkey ATKD 00000020 000000fa

for the brightness down key, every press that is precedes by an "brightness down" keypress produces two ATKD-events:
video LCDD 00000087 00000000
hotkey ATKD 00000020 000000fb
hotkey ATKD 00000020 000000fc
That's not the case for brightness up.

After reloading the events seem ok, as I am really able to access the whole brightness scale. LCDD events are absent:
hotkey ATKD 00000020 0000005d
hotkey ATKD 00000020 0000005e
hotkey ATKD 00000020 0000005f
hotkey ATKD 00000020 00000060
hotkey ATKD 00000011 0000000b
hotkey ATKD 00000012 0000000a
hotkey ATKD 00000013 00000009
hotkey ATKD 00000014 00000007
hotkey ATKD 00000015 00000005
hotkey ATKD 00000016 00000003
hotkey ATKD 00000017 00000002
hotkey ATKD 00000018 00000002
hotkey ATKD 00000019 00000002
hotkey ATKD 0000001a 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000001b 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000001c 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000001d 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000001e 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000001f 00000005
hotkey ATKD 0000001f 00000006
hotkey ATKD 0000001f 00000007
hotkey ATKD 0000001f 00000008
hotkey ATKD 0000002e 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000002d 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000002c 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000002b 00000001
hotkey ATKD 0000002a 00000001
hotkey ATKD 00000029 00000001
hotkey ATKD 00000028 00000002
hotkey ATKD 00000027 00000002
hotkey ATKD 00000026 00000002
hotkey ATKD 00000025 00000003
hotkey ATKD 00000024 00000005
hotkey ATKD 00000023 00000007
hotkey ATKD 00000022 00000009
hotkey ATKD 0000002...

[Peter Klotz (peter-klotz)]

I had exactly the same problem on my Asus B50A laptop in Jaunty.

However starting with Karmic Alpha 3 this problem is fixed. The brightness keys work perfectly there. All brightness levels are present.

Daniel, Divan, can you confirm this for your laptops?

[Gergely Fábián (gergely.fabian)]

I tested Karmic alpha6 with a Lenovo SL500, and something similar is happening:

> Using the "brightness up" key I randomly get the darkest or the almost-brightest setting.
> With the "brightness down" key I get the brightest or almost-darkest setting.

If I press the "brightness up" key really long, or the "brightness down" key really long then I can get the desired effect (the darkest, or the brightest), though it's still toggling between two phases, but one of the phases is the desired (something like this).

[Gergely Fábián (gergely.fabian)]

Just realised, my laptop also has Intel GMA 4500MHD (it's a Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 NRJ6FHV to be exact).

[Xgamer4 (pyromaster4)]

Seems like the same bug described, though I'm running Linux Mint 7 x64 instead of plain Ubuntu. Still, it should carry through, seeing as how Mint is based on Ubuntu, right?

Anyway, the one thing I tried is the fix detailed at the top of this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=870681&page=21

It stopped the annoying flickering when going from pitch-black to slightly-lighter with the function keys, but it's still there if I force a higher brightness using the slider.

My laptop's a Lenovo Ideapad Y530.

[Gergely Fábián (gergely.fabian)]

For my SL500 the newest Karmic daily live partly fixes this issue (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/20091004/).
The brightness changes according to the down/up keys, there is no toggling any more. On the other hand the on-screen brightness indicator does not always show the appropriate value (jumping, going down just to half, etc.).

[Gergely Fábián (gergely.fabian)]

It works now all ok (brigthness changes, indicator shows appropriate value) for me on SL500 with Karmic RC (with updated packages, so I assume it's the release version).

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Daniel,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid.

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 368506

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

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[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Incomplete and has not had any updated comments for quite some time. As a result this bug is being closed. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu release http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download . Also, please be sure to provide any requested information that may have been missing. To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]