Comment 11 for bug 385723

As written on http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/devkit-devel/2009-July/000268.html, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manager/+bug/385723/comments/5, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manager/+bug/385723/comments/9, this is not really a gnome-power-manager problem really.

The entire idea of smartdimmer is a hack, device drivers belong into kernel just as any other backlight interface the kernel offers. If X.org merges the smartdimmer logic in its xbacklight support, that's fine of course.

The hal support for smartdimmer isn't going away anytime soon, so for these platforms it's perhaps possible to add back the gnome-power-manager support for it. (We could use this bug for tracking that.)

Note that the smartdimmer addition to hal itself is also an Ubuntuism and was rejected upstream for similar reasons (http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/hal/2009-January/012859.html, should go into the kernel).