Some laptops map level zero to screen off

[Max Bowsher]

I am using indicator-brightness on an Asus Zenbook Prime UX21A.

With BIOS version 206, there were brightness levels zero through 10 reported by gnome-settings-daemon, and all of these were sensibly behaved.

I have recently upgraded to BIOS version 215, and now g-s-d reports 4296 brightness levels! Furthermore, setting level to anything less than around 30 renders the screen incredibly hard to read. Setting it to 0 or 1 is approximately equivalent to turning it off entirely.

This leads to a situation unrecoverable without a reboot if you do this and cannot then control the mouse pointer blind to undo it.

For lack of a better idea, I would suggest a heuristic like: "if more than 100 brightness levels reported, delete zero from the list of levels that will be used"

[Jan Simon (jan-simon)]

Interesting problem ;-) As there are no hardware buttons on this machine to solve this issue, your idea might be a way to solve it. Are you interested in writing a patch?

[Johannes Rosina (johrosina)]

As the original poster described, I tried the indicator-brightness.py script for setting the brightness on a Zenbook Prime:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbookPrime#Experimental_changing_brightness_workaround_1

Because setting the brightness level to zero shuts down the backlight, I patched indicator-brightness.py to show levels starting from 1. This works for me on BIOS 215.

[Erwin Rohde (errier)]

Not really a fix for this bug, but I added a script with which you can control indicator-brightness through dbus.
Which is abacadabra for:
A script you can add to your custom keyboard shortcuts to control the brightness of your screen.
It accepts two parameters: --up and --down.

The script is located here: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~indicator-brightness/indicator-brightness/trunk/files
and named 'indicator-brightness-adjust'. You also need revision 9 of the indicator itself.

For example you could bind F5 to indicator-brightness-adjust --down, and F8 to indicator-brightness-adjust --up.

Hopefully, Jan will build a package to make our lives easier ;-)

[Jan Simon (jan-simon)]

I'm sorry, i haven't seen the discussion here earlier, but Erwin already fixed the packaging.
About the workaround: Maybe it's time for a settings dialog now ;-)

[sokai (sokai)]

Hey!

Is there some progress (for indicator-brightness itself))? – I'm using this indicator with my ASUS Zenbook UX303LNB (where Fn keys for managing brightness are not working) and Ubuntu 16.04.

Thanks in advance and best regards!