[Debian-eeepc-devel] New tests was: Weird behavior with display

[Alan Jenkins]

On 11/4/09, Ernesto Domato <edomat at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 07:08, Alan Jenkins
> <sourcejedi.lkml at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Yes, splashy would definitely be a candidate to my eyes :-).
>>
>> I would also suggest ConsoleKit as a remote possibility.  ConsoleKit
>> monitors logins and VT switches, which you've mentioned as affecting
>> the blackscreen behaviour.  It might be triggering something strange.
>>
>> Alan
>>
>
> Well, you were right again Alan before when you point me that it could
> be some problem on the brightness of the display. After several hours
> of testing installing packages and again starting experimenting the
> same behavior (it happened after installing the Sid eglibc suite of
> packages that comprise libc-bin, libc6, libc6-i686 and locales version
> 2.10.1-5 but going back to the Squeeze version didn't fix the problem)
> on one boot with the black display I touched the brightness control
> key of the 901 (Fn+F4) and it started to shows up the screen finally.
> What amaze me was that I didn't thought that the computer will keep
> the brightness state of the display even when you turn off the
> computer and then turn it on so the Asus screen at the beginning of
> the boot process isn't shown because of the black screen product of
> the brightness setting.

;-D.  It's the sort of thing you can easily miss until it's pointed
out.  I think it's a great feature that it remembers the brightness
level - so long as you don't have this "zero brightness" problem!

> So, there's still some problem when I shutdown the system from the
> Gnome desktop environment that puts the brightness state of the
> display at the lower level (turning it black) that I should try to see
> what is provoking it that doesn't happens when I shutdown the system
> from the GDM login manager or a tty console. But at least I know what
> the behavior is and maybe someone could point me to which package
> could be messing with the brightness setting. I think that
> gnome-power-manager with devicekit-power is a good candidate as is
> gnome-screensaver, but I'm not so sure really.
>
> Thanks,
> Ernesto

If you haven't already, I would certainly try killing
gnome-power-manager, and seeing if the problem goes away.
gnome-screensaver sounds like a long shot, but you could try the same
experiment.

I read somewhere that gnome-power-manager recently added support for
running the "xbacklight" utility, to set the brightness via the X
driver.  But I don't think it's reached debian... there's a debian
xbacklight package but I can't find anything that depends on it, so
you probably don't even have it installed.

Alan