Comment 29 for bug 43572

(In reply to comment #18)
> Nope, it was I. That makes sense now. :) I'm really not sure what this "glue"
> would look like (I'm only really interested in the gnome-power-manager sexiness
> that can come from this), but is there anything I can do to help?

The general idea is that GPM talks to HAL to change the brightness. The very
point of HAL is to provide a means of talking to hardware that is independent of
the eccentricities of individual pieces of hardware. This makes HAL the logical
place to put the 'glue' to the libraries specific to Dell machines.

In HAL, there is a function to change the brightness of the display. On Dell
machines this does not work. On machines that properly handle ACPI (or are
otherwise supported), this function changes the brightness up and down and is
used by GPM for the dimming.

The aim of this request is to create a Dell version of this function so that
when applications call the brightness functions of HAL, it actually does
something for us. If you are a programmer and are keen to attempt this, it would
be a matter of integrating the work of libSMBIOS into HAL.

If, like me, you don't have these skills, you will need to wait until somebody
that does have the skills has a go!