GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 661810
macbook screen doesnt unblank after resume or screen lock
Last modified: 2012-07-19 10:26:03 UTC
hi folks, i am experiencing some problems on my macbook with gnome 3.2 and its backlight control. as you may know, there are fn-keys that control the level of backlight on the macbook, so you can control it, and the software does also know on what level it is. the problem however comes in after it blanks the screen and then locks the screen. after i hit the keyboard, it resumes but the screen backlight resumes to 0%. so that i dont see anything i type ... for example IF i type a password. how there are more fixes to this, but to me the best fix is the macosx one. macosx does NOT disable the FN / ACPI keys while it is locked. that is the best fix, because i can then adjust the sound level and backlight while the screen is locked. that would work exactly the same as it does on macosx. there is also no security risk by letting the FN keys work, as long as they are not configurable to do anything else. the second fix, maybe a faster one would be to disable the automatic backlight control (i disabled the option "dim screen" but it did not help!!!) or at least set it to never go under 10% on macbooks at least, so that you can at least see something. i would not miss it. because i think that this option that you can disable the backlight completely is useless, because then it makes more sense to turn the screen off (saves also more energy). so one time again for clarification. my problem is that i dont see anything after it enables the screen, so turning the screen off and on again is NOT a problem, that works fine, but after the resume, it goes on with 0% backlight which makes no sense as long as you dont see anything as well. i dont know where it takes the setting from, because i run my backlight at 100% or at least over 50% and never less. so it doesnt resume to a previous setting (as macosx does for example).
btw. I am running Fedora 16 x86_64 (amd64) PS: in case you are writing a patch for this, DO NOT simply kick in some more levels of backlight, but instead you can rely on the system (ACPI) or whatever, which knows what the current backlight setting is. so you can write an IF control structure that says, well IF you are on 0% (or simply the minimum) backlight setting, THEN kick in at least one more level, so that the user can see something after unblanking. so that finally the patch can be applied to the mainstream, because that adjustment would not hurt on other laptops as well. the only exeption on macbooks i can think of is that on this old 2007 one it would be preferable to have at least 50% backlight after unblank and if it is below that after resume, then it should be set to above or at least exactly to 50%. but that would be more like a feauture request.
I just want to add something: the problem occurs only after DIM, exactly like the others reported. so after resume from suspend to ram, there is no problem, that resumes to the same backlight setting as before. so only Gnome here seems to dim the backlight to the lowest setting, thats why it is a Gnome BUG! and one more thing. the driver to be used here is INTEL_BACKLIGHT. so it is not apple-backlight -> i dont know what apple-backlight does, but here it is not relevant, to me apple-backlight does not do anything. so the relevant driver is INTEL and NOT apple!
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Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!