Xfce Forum

tbqhmhsfamilam

Member

Registered: 2018-05-10

Posts: 20

Laptop backlight steps Dell Inspiron N5110

This is a long shot but I hoped to get some input on my laptop backlight situation. I'm using Debian 9 with xfce 4.12, kernel 4.16.0, i915 video module, and I've backported xfce4-power-manager 1.6.1 over 1.4.4. Out of the box, backlight keys didn't work whatsoever, but the slider did. I tried various kernel parameters and found that using acpi_backlight=native works best - in /sys/class/backlight, I now only have one entry, intel_backlight, where before for I either had both acpivideo0 and intel_backlight, or only intel_backlight but it didn't work. I have a xorg.conf file specifying to use intel_backlight.

So right now what I'm trying to do is get the backlight keys to adjust in smaller steps - I have only five increments currently.

Another option I considered was trying to get my system to use only acpivideo0 as there are 15 steps there, with step 1 (or 0, I can't remember) being a very dim screen as opposed to intel_backlight's lowest step being a completely blank screen. I'd prefer to use acpivideo0 and thought about using a udev rule to force intel_backlight to disable but I couldn't figure it out and that's outside of the scope of the xfce forum anyway I'm sure.

So, any feedback on how to decrease the xfce4-power-manager backlight increments I'd be happy to hear, thanks for your time.

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: Laptop backlight steps Dell Inspiron N5110

Are you aware of this Bugzilla thread? Seems like there's a patch ready, pending approval.

tbqhmhsfamilam

Member

Registered: 2018-05-10

Posts: 20

Re: Laptop backlight steps Dell Inspiron N5110

Oh wow awesome! I'm going to give it a go, building it with the patch. Thanks!

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: Laptop backlight steps Dell Inspiron N5110

Good luck! Please tell us how it goes, it seems a nice improvement.

tbqhmhsfamilam

Member

Registered: 2018-05-10

Posts: 20

Re: Laptop backlight steps Dell Inspiron N5110

It works pretty good! It gives you an option in power manager settings for "Brightness Step Count" from 2 - 100, where 2 is either on or off, and 100 is 100 increments, along with a checkbox for "exponential", so with exponential checked, the increments become smaller and smaller as the screen goes dimmer... very nice addition, I hope they end up including it in main. I git cloned master and applied the patch, make installed to /usr/local/bin... unfortunately my deb skills aren't to where I was able to make a proper deb out of it or apply the patch to an existing deb, but the functionality is definitely an improvement in my case. Good stuff!

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: Laptop backlight steps Dell Inspiron N5110

That's great! Thanks for testing.