hardware brightness keys on lenovo R60e are working "strange" in gnome

[Pawel Ludwikow]

Ubuntu Feisty herd5. IBM/lenovo R60e. Kernel 2.6.20-9-generic

Problem: the hardware brightness keys (Fn+Home "brighter" & Fn+End "dimmer") are working in most strange way: when either one is pressed the display is made blank. The screen is restored after a few clicks (Fn+Home takes longer to return to visible state than Fn+End). The gnome brightness popup usually shows the correct brightness setting. The keys are working ok in win xp pro and in virtual consoles.

Additionally the dropdown brightness applet doesn't work as expected: clicking on the slidebar causes the display to cycle from brightest do dimmest setting (or vice versa) in less than 1 second. It is very difficult to set the intermediate brightness level using this slider. The /proc/acpi/ibm interface however works flawlessly - allows to read the brightness setting and to change it.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Mar 9 20:20:31 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Uname: Linux discovery 2.6.20-9-generic #2 SMP Mon Feb 26 03:01:44 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Pawel Ludwikow (pludwiko)]

Killing the gnome-power-manager doesn't help. It still behaves strange. The only effect is that gnome-brightness-applet can't get brightness information.

[Kerouac (lubiapolo)]

Same problem with new Thinkpad T60 and Feisty: The hardware brightness keys (Fn+Home "brighter" & Fn+End "dimmer") are working in most strange way: when either one is pressed the display is made blank.

Thats because the screen is switched to external monitor.

The screen is restored after a few click, but brightness didn change.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

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 reproducable with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Gutsy Gibbon. 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 [WWW] http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Pawel Ludwikow (pludwiko)]

I'm testing the gutsy release (i forgot which version but it must be a fairy recent one gutsy-desktop-i386.iso a598c81b75d68353c23508d1d50ee26c), and here are my results:

- it's a bit better - Fn+Home(brighten) and Fn+End(darken) no longer toggles between lcd and vga-out,

- the brightness level itself does not change after pressing the keys mentioned above - a brightness popup appears (not always) but there is no permanent change. There is a slight (<0.5s) change in brightness but it quickly returns to the previous state (my wild guess: a hardware changes the brightness but is overriden by software setting).

In text mode (outside of X) the brightness (still) can be changed freely. - after returning to X the brightness popup appears.

Sometimes the brightness popup doesn't disappear by itself, only after pressing Fn+Home or Fn+End.

The gnome brightness applet works better in this release - the brightness level can be easily changed and it stays at the chosen value. The mouse wheel also does the job. The slider changes the brightness of the display and shows brightness popup with correct setting. Once I've found some kind of problem with clicking on the vertical slider - it almost always disappeared before click was finished. Most of the time it just works.

There are still some issues with this applet. After setting brightness with the applet to medium level, any press of Fn+Home or Fn+End always gives full brightness, and the brightness slider position(applet) is not updated to reflect current brightness.

There is no /proc/acpi/ibm directory and I can't find appropriate kernel module to make it appear.

I've tested the keys with xev. The brighten/darken keys rarely show any result. Most of the time there is no new messages from xev (despite that ibm_keyboard_lamp Fn+PgUp always show events). In the rare moments that an event is recorded a brightness popup appears as well. The events for Fn+End are:

KeyPress event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
    root 0x67, subw 0x3400002, time 1966184626, (54,37), root:(866,161),
    state 0x0, keycode 101 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
    root 0x67, subw 0x3400002, time 1966184626, (54,37), root:(866,161),
    state 0x0, keycode 101 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

--- and for Fn+Home: ---
KeyPress event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
    root 0x67, subw 0x3400002, time 1966575811, (62,30), root:(874,154),
    state 0x0, keycode 212 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
    root 0x67, subw 0x3400002, time 1966575811, (62,30), root:(874,154),
    state 0x0, keycode 212 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

The hardware sound volume keys still work, are more consistent (number of steps "up" is equa...

[Pawel Ludwikow (pludwiko)]

I've done some more tests and it seems that this is a X server issue. Running X server only (started from root console) exhibits the same behavior - the brightness changes for a subsecond and it is restored.
After pressing Fn+Home the following lines appear in Xorg.log:

(II) PM Event received: Capability Changed
I830PMEvent: Capability change

[Basilio Kublik (sourcercito)]

Hi there
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 is this still an issue for you? Can you please try with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Hardy Heron?

Thanks in advance.

[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!.

[Nicholas J Kreucher (kreucher)]

I have the same problem with a Lenovo Ideapad Y530.

Looking at ACPI, /etc/acpi/events/video_brightnessup and /etc/acpi/events/video_brightnessdown are matched, and the appropriate scripts are called. Even replacing these scripts with "exit" you have the same behavior. So it seems the hardware(?) or the xserver(?) is actually trying to control the brightness.

On this computer, /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness shows:
levels: 90 80 69 59 49 40 35 27 20 9 1
current: 59

Testing, only those exact values work for the brightness, and they do work fine from the /proc interface.

Some folks resolve this by setting 4 and 5 to /proc/acpi/ibm/cmos upon brightnessup and down, respectively. However, /proc/acpi/ibm doesn't exist, and thinkpad_acpi won't load on an Ideapad.

For those using a Lenovo Thinkpad, see this:
http://vntutor.blogspot.com/2007/12/brightness-buttons-in-lenovo-thinkpad.html

[Nicholas J Kreucher (kreucher)]

More information...

With the acpi "video" module unloaded, the brightness up/down hardware keys do nothing. And no ACPI events are generated. So this narrows it down to ACPI events.

With it loaded, when the buttons are pressed, acpid notifies both the X server and hald-addon-acpi that the buttons were pressed. Killing hald-addon-acpi does not modify the behavior. Thus, it's gotta be the X server itself getting it backwards.

So I think some solutions might be:

1) Tell acpid not to notify the X server for these events, and control it with video_brightnessup.sh and video_brightnessdown.sh via /proc instead.

2) Find out where in the X server the brightness is being set, and fix it for Lenovo(?) models.

This Ideapad Y530 has a "Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)" video card, and X is using the "intel" module. Using Ubuntu 8.10.

[Doodle77 (doodle777)]

Also happens on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9.

[Doodle77 (doodle777)]

nevermind, probably bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/205261 >_>

[damip (damipator)]

I can confirm the bug with an up-to-date Jaunty on my Lenovo 3000 C200.
The same thing with brightness keys and applet.
I also have a problem with brightness settings : when I configure the system to do not dim the screen after few minutes of inactivity, the setting is ignored and it still tries (and fails) to reduce brightness, what causes the screen to fade many times, while eating 100% of the CPU.
Also, when I open VLC, or somme SDL/OpenGl application, the brightness is reduced to its minimal value, and with the first problem, it's hard to restore it.

[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.

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

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!