GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 571807
backlight on screen oscillates
Last modified: 2009-02-16 05:08:39 UTC
Please describe the problem: When the system is running off of battery power the screen brightness oscillates randomly over a period of a couple of minutes. It seems as though gpm detects that the system is idle and then turns down the screen backlight, very very very slowly. After it brings the screen brightness down, it then detects that the system is not so idle and then brings the brightness back up, very very very slowly. There are two problems with this. The first is that the system is not idle, this happens even when I am actively typing or using the mouse. The second is, of course, the speed at which the backlight is adjusted. Related bugs appear to be bug 566095 and bug 555526. Though I've filed a new report as the symptoms are not identicaly (this does not happen when I set the backlight and my system never becomes unresponsive). Steps to reproduce: Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information:
Created attachment 128758 [details] Output of gnome-power-bugreport.sh
Created attachment 128759 [details] Output from gconftool-2 --recursive-list /apps/gnome-power-manager
Created attachment 128761 [details] Log from running gnome-power-manager --verbose --nodaemon The laptop is unplugged around 9:03 and the backlight begins to oscillate around 9:05.
Created attachment 128762 [details] Output from xbacklight This is the output from xbacklight just to demonstrate that change in the backlight brightness is real and to show the duration over which the transition occurs. This was recorded at the same time as the gpm log was recorded so the timestamps should match up.
Finally, I just looked at the output from the bugreport too and it does not seem to be able to locate information on the hardware so I thought I would provide that as well. It is an IBM ThinkPad X40. Here is the output from uname -a Linux elysium 2.6.28-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Feb 8 10:13:45 UTC 2009 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1200MHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux It is running Arch linux, and was fully patched as of yesterday.
Your version is very old. gnome-power-manager-2.24.4 should fix things for you.
Well, my version isn't that old, it looks like it was released just a couple of months ago. At any rate, I downloaded and built 2.24.4 and can verify that this fixes the problem. I'm marking this bug as a duplicate of bug 566095 (Richard, thanks for getting that fixed). *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 566095 ***