brigtness slider should not allow total darkness

[Bernard Banko]

bq aquaris 4.5, Utopic Unicorn 20150312-002053:
slider allows to minimize the brightess to the point of not seeing at all.
Even if you manage to reboot (you don't see the confirmation dialogue) you still have completly dark display which effectively "bricks" the phone (no battery removal) unless you are patient enought to blindly try and hit long time enough to increase the brigtness again.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

That's weird as I can't reproduce this with my device, but I'm still using a prototype.

Asking someone with a final device to give another try, but we can for sure try to change the minimal value as required.

You can restore back the brightness if you have access to a terminal, by doing the following:
sudo echo 10 > /sys/devices/platform/leds-mt65xx/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness

Can you play with the values and find out what is the minimum you get that is still able to see visualize unity8? Our minimum is currently 5, so would be great if you could play with that bit and give us the feedback.

Thanks

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

I just tried the same kind of proto handset rsalveti mentioned side by side with a production Ubuntu edition device. Both devices appeared to still show a (dim) backlight at the lowest setting the UI allowed.

I could see that the screen backlight went all the way off when the device was turned off with the power button.

Is there some other step (setting auto brightness, tweaking something else?) we need to do to see the effect you observe?

[Bernard Banko (beernarrd)]

Ricardo, I have tried with SDK and found out that minimum is 7. Lower than that it is completely dark. Max is 255.
Is there a way to set the minimum through a text file edit only, so I don't need to wait for updates?

John, the only thing could be the update that was launched right away after first time switching the phone on.
The last number on the OS buld info screen is 1424122255 (the one below the "KRILIN..." line. Translated to english it would be "customisation image" or something like that).

By the way, the screen dims (without locking, because set on "never") after a minute to the minimum level 5 (backlight effectively switched off). Where can I change the time for this. Not ideal when using maps in car.

Thanks.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

I proposed a change to change minimum from 5 to 10, which should cover your issue specifically.

If you want a workaround until next OTA is out (1-2 weeks), do the following (from your host):
1 - Download the attached config file and save as config-krillin.xml
2 - adb push config-krillin.xml /tmp/
3 - adb shell:
$ sudo mount -o remount,rw /
$ sudo cp /tmp/config-krillin.xml /usr/share/powerd/device_configs/config-krillin.xml
$ sudo reboot

Also opened bug 1437510 for the dim issue, as that is indeed a problem.

[Bernard Banko (beernarrd)]

Thanks. It works now.

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 11:45 PM, Ricardo Salveti <email address hidden>
wrote:

> I proposed a change to change minimum from 5 to 10, which should cover
> your issue specifically.
>
> If you want a workaround until next OTA is out (1-2 weeks), do the
> following (from your host):
> 1 - Download the attached config file and save as config-krillin.xml
> 2 - adb push config-krillin.xml /tmp/
> 3 - adb shell:
> $ sudo mount -o remount,rw /
> $ sudo cp /tmp/config-krillin.xml
> /usr/share/powerd/device_configs/config-krillin.xml
> $ sudo reboot
>
> Also opened bug 1437510 for the dim issue, as that is indeed a problem.
>
> ** Attachment added: "config-krillin.xml"
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-power/+bug/1436538/+attachment/4358308/+files/config-krillin.xml
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1436538
>
> Title:
> brigtness slider should not allow total darkness
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-power/+bug/1436538/+subscriptions
>

[Bernard Banko (beernarrd)]

Thanks. It works now. Happy again :)

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

@pat, please can you triage this onto a milestone, so I know where to land it. Thanks.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

Device tarball was validated by QA already, waiting for John to publish it.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

Marking the indicator-power task as invalid as I believe the fix we're doing is to change the device specific configuration for the bq device and nothing general in indicator-power.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

in device tarball

[Joseph Wakeling (webdrake)]

Any chance of a _very_ hand-holdy description of how to fix this? I ran into the issue yesterday with my Aquaris phone (obviously the updated image hasn't landed on the phones yet) and, as the original submitter says, now have an effectively bricked phone (although the alarm woke me up this morning:-).

The workaround described in comment 4 is simply not detailed enough for me to understand what I need to do (or the risks associated with it). In many ways I'd be more comfortable using some kind of "press these hardware buttons in this combination to reset settings to default" kind of option (if that exists and won't also result in my data being wiped).

For the record, my phone was AFAIK up to date in terms of OTA updates (as in, yesterday lunchtime I'd updated the OS and apps).

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

Even if the OTA goes live, I'm not sure how you might get it on a phone if you can't interact with it.

You have two choices:

 - update the phone manually from an attached ubuntu desktop

 - Use the handset's factory reset proceedure.

The first is well covered by our developer documentation. Simply reflashing to the current image with --wipe will reset the brightness to a sensible value (and wipe all your other data)

The second would be hold down 'volup' + power. When the machine starts rebooting (~10 sec) a red led lights, and you should release just the power button.

You will eventually be presented with a menu. follow the on-screen instructions to select recovery.

When the ubuntu logo appears, use 'Volup' again to get a menu of options. One of which is 'factory reset'.

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

That info seemed to belong on askubuntu:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/609938/how-do-i-factory-reset-a-bq-aquaris-e4-5-ubuntu-edition-from-the-handset

[Joseph Wakeling (webdrake)]

@John -- thanks very much for the feedback. One question: what does the "wipe cache partition" option mean (as opposed to the factory reset, which is obvious)?

[John McAleely (john.mcaleely)]

Exactly what it says, which is perhaps not helpful :-)

The cache partition is used for downloads, etc which are in your browser
(and other) caches. It should contain only transient data. One notable data
type stored here are OTA updates before they are installed.

In your case, I don't imagine resetting it will change anything.

On 16 April 2015 at 11:01, Joseph Wakeling <email address hidden> wrote:

> @John -- thanks very much for the feedback. One question: what does the
> "wipe cache partition" option mean (as opposed to the factory reset,
> which is obvious)?
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1436538
>
> Title:
> brigtness slider should not allow total darkness
>
> Status in the base for Ubuntu mobile products:
> Fix Released
> Status in indicator-power package in Ubuntu:
> Invalid
>
> Bug description:
> bq aquaris 4.5, Utopic Unicorn 20150312-002053:
> slider allows to minimize the brightess to the point of not seeing at
> all.
> Even if you manage to reboot (you don't see the confirmation dialogue)
> you still have completly dark display which effectively "bricks" the phone
> (no battery removal) unless you are patient enought to blindly try and hit
> long time enough to increase the brigtness again.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+bug/1436538/+subscriptions
>

[Joseph Wakeling (webdrake)]

@John thanks again for clarification. In any case I did a factory reset via the power+VolUp buttons. All back and working now. Perhaps a worthwhile feature request for the future, to have a reset option that resets device settings, without wiping data? :-)

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Joseph, <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemSettings#phone-reset> specifies a "Reset All System Settings" function that hasn't been implemented yet. But even if it had been, you couldn't navigate to it if the screen was blank.

This is an example of bug 1371703, that we have no fallback process when a bug prevents people from installing the update that fixes the bug.

[Joseph Wakeling (webdrake)]

@Matthew I guess I was assuming that the reset-all-system-settings option could be provided via the boot options available after pressing the power+VolUp buttons (I'm assuming here that the secondary menu made available when pressing VolUp during the recovery boot is not suitable, as it looked like that was part of the Android stack, but might be wrong).