sony-laptop module + mandriva2008

[Guest stritm0nkey]

hello,

 

I m new on this forum but have used mandriva since 10.1 now. I just have some basic knowledge of linux.

 

I have a sony fs980 laptop with mandriva 2008 on it. I use the new sony-laptop module which replaces sonypi. I have set the module to load at boot (and lsmod shows it does), and I have configured all the text files commanding the brightness (brightness, brightness_default...) to set the lowest brightness according to the manual found there : http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/Documenta...txt?v=linux-2.6

 

BUT, every time I boot the brightness is at its maximum . I can then go to the /sys/class/backlight/sony/brightness file to find that the zero value is written. When I save this file, the brightness comes to the minimum as it should be. I can also go in the configuration of Kpowersave, move the brightness cursor and it works.

I also noticed that when I do some other things, the brightness increases to the maximum unexpectedly. Among others : when I watch a video in firefox with mplayer or when I modify some items in the KDE control center (don t remember which ones). Then when I look into the brightness text file, it shows nothing or the right value(0in my case). Again, entering 0 and saving the file works.

 

It feels like some other program was controling the brightness instead of the sony-laptop module. It is not sonypi because it is not loaded. Before when I didn t use sonypi or sony-laptop, at boot, I remember the brightness was the same as the one I set previously under windows.

 

This problem is killing my eyes and it s annoying to reset the brightness as i want every time. If some experienced users know the reason of this, I would appreciate your help.

[Guest tkitzky]

Are you running x86_64 (64-bit) version? I've been searching for the last week trying to figure out a similar problem with Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit on a Sony Vaio VGN-NR160 laptop.

 

I have found the backlight and several other acpi controlled events, such as Fn keys, are handled by the "sony-laptop" kernel module. This module is included in kernels since 2.6.21.? But... I also found a post saying this module is not available for 64-bit architectures. This would explain why I can't find it in my package repositories.

 

Anyways... good luck. Here are a few urls I found helpful. Also, if you are desperate, you can try installing package "xbacklight". Use a command like "xbacklight -set 50" to reduce backlight to 50%. It's not much use for you since you do have some control over the backlight. This is the only thing that works for me.

 

http://www.leverkruid.eu/linux-laptop/index.html

http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/Documenta...txt?v=linux-2.6

http://www.linux.it/~malattia/wiki/index.php/Sony-laptop