No popup OSD for Dell Studio laptops

[Mario Limonciello]

Currently, several Dell laptops contain Intel graphics cards. The Intel driver reports that it is able to change the display brightness, however it also reports the number of levels supported is zero.

In cases such as these, gnome power manager should fallback to the functional
HAL Backend if it's available for the laptop.

When falling back to the HAL backend, since the laptop supports the brightness changing from the HW key rather than trying to force a value change, some changes are necessary in that logic too.
----

IMPACT:
This is a low impact problem, but a regression from Hardy

ADDRESSING:
This has been addressed in upstream stable gnome 2.24's svn tree as well as gnome trunk. It has been included in Jaunty as well.

TEST CASE:
This is only "known" to affect the Studio 1535 and 1537, but likely affects other platforms too. It can be reproduced by trying to press the brightness keys on such a platform. No popup OSD is observed.

REGRESSION POTENTIAL:
The code doesn't introduce any new methods, but simply adds better logic handling for corner cases. The risk for regression shouldn't be high.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-power-manager - 2.24.0-0ubuntu11

---------------
gnome-power-manager (2.24.0-0ubuntu11) jaunty; urgency=low

  * 77-hal-brightness-in-hardware.patch: Don't fail to show the OSD
    when brightness changing is supported in hardware. (LP: #304187)
  * 78-xrandr-hal-fallback.patch: Fall back to HAL if xrandr calls
    do fail or will be failing.

 -- Mario Limonciello <email address hidden> Mon, 01 Dec 2008 02:56:38 -0500

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Accepted gnome-power-manager into intrepid-proposed, please test and give feedback here. Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

[Kostas Chatzikokolakis (kostas-chatzi)]

I had this issue on a Dell xps 1330, I confirm that gnome-power-manager 2.24.0-0ubuntu8.1 from intrepid-proposed fixes it. Good job guys :)

[Essence (bryanmcconkey)]

I had an issue (tracked in bug 261721) where adjusting brightness caused loss of most keybord functionality, thankfuly updating to a proposed linux-image fixed that problem, but sadly broke my on screen indicator for brightness.

I can now happily report that updating my gnome-power-manager has corrected this second issue.

So for reference I am running a Dell Inspirion 6400
gnome-power-manager 2.24.0-0ubuntu8.1
linux-image-2.6.27-10.20

[Essence (bryanmcconkey)]

One additional point, the graphics card in my laptop is not intel, but nvidia.

[Brenden Bain (brendenbain)]

I also had this issue on my Dell 9300. I can confirm that the upgrade to gnome-power-manager 2.24.0-0ubuntu8.1 has fixed the problem. My graphics card is also an Nvidia and not Intel.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-power-manager - 2.24.0-0ubuntu8.1

---------------
gnome-power-manager (2.24.0-0ubuntu8.1) intrepid-proposed; urgency=low

  * Add following patches from 2.24 stable svn branch (LP: #304187)
    - 77-hal-brightness-in-hardware.patch: Don't fail to show the OSD
      when brightness changing is supported in hardware.
    - 78-xrandr-hal-fallback.patch: Fall back to HAL if xrandr calls
      do fail or will be failing.
  * 79-enable-battery-hotkey.patch:
    - Enable hotkey that got disabled at 2.24.0's release. (LP: #281134)
  * debian/control:
    - Build depend on newer x11proto-core for providing XF86Battery
      hotkey keysm.

 -- Mario Limonciello <email address hidden> Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:21:55 -0600