Lenovo S10-3 Opensuse 11.3 brightness Control

English Hardware
1

Hi forum,
I installed opensuse 11.3 with KDE on my new Lenovo ideapad 11-3. First of all, everthing works out of the box, except the brightness controll.


lspci -nnk
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation N10 Family DMI Bridge [8086:a010]
        Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:3907]
        Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:a011]
        Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:3908]
        Kernel driver in use: i915

I’m using the KMS driver. The kernel i915 is chosen automaticaly, so I haven’t change the xorg settings at all. I’m not sure, if that’s the right driver, becaus the S10-3 is have the GMA 3150…

I my /proc/acpi directory I couldn’t find anything like video or backlight. So I’m wondering if acpi is switched on for the video part. (ACPI for CPU is working)

There should be a solution, because the Quickstart linux, which comes with the Lenov has a working brightness…
Any ideas??

2

found a nice workaround
Brightness Workaround for Ubuntu

because I can’t find a /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants file, I’m unable to do a transfer to Opensuse.

3

Assming you need to press Fn+ some other key for brightness control, are you sure the Fn + brightness key combo are working? Is the key press producing any output? You can see this by running xev and acpi_listen in a terminal and then pressing your keys. On my TP X60s not all the Fn key combos worked out of the box in KDE even though they were producing output. If you are getting output from the Fn+screen combo and you know the command line to change the screen brightness then a dirty solution you can try is mapping the key combo in KDE’s setting settings>Input Actions. I mapped my Sleep, Hibernate and Lock screen buttons there.

Create a script to increase brightness and one to decrease brightness and when mapping your keys point each to the corresponding script.

4

the brightness keys are not working ( checked with xev ) but that’s a minor problem. brightness controll is also not working with the batterie applet.

But a good point. I will map with KDE some other fkt keys to my workaround script!!

5

I know yours is not a Thinkpad and slightly different architecture but these may help if you haven’t already seen them.
Thinkwiki - Special keys
Thinkwiki - ACPI - Hot keys
Thinkpads forum - Linux questions

You say that xev didn’t generate any events but did the acpi_listen generate an event?

6

acpi_listen s not generating an event. Not with the keys and not with the battery applet. As I said, there is not acpi/video directory.

7

This thread is a few months old. Nevertheless, in case if y have not found a solution yet or maybe someone in future have this problem & stumbled upon this thread through Google search engine or others, may this hopefully help them.

Same with me

Here are the 1,2,3,4,5,6 step-ideas (that work for my laptop)

  1. Go to YaST
  2. Choose “System” at left panel
  3. Choose “Boot Loader” at right panel
  4. At “Boot Loader Settings” dialog, choose the openSuSe partition/label then “edit”
  5. At “Optional Kernel Command Line Parameter” textbox,

add

acpi_osi=Linux

to the end of the textbox.

mine, looks like this

resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Hitachi_HTS545032B9A300_100218PBN3041THNNKHR-part6 splash=silent quiet showopts acpi_osi=Linux

  1. “OK” , then restart the computer
  2. Then, tell me if it works for you, optional though :slight_smile: or
  3. Ask me if any step above is not clear, also still optional :slight_smile:

It works for me, hope will be for you too ( if y have not found a fix yet)

I used both Ubuntu 10.10 & OpenSuSe 11.3 KDE , the solution works for both distros for the same Acer laptop :slight_smile:

Original solution source - [ubuntu] Brightness problem in Ubuntu 9.10 on Acer Extensa 5235 - Ubuntu Forums]([ubuntu] Brightness problem in Ubuntu 9.10 on Acer Extensa 5235)

8

thanx. it works on my Acer Aspire 5742z

9

Hello all, I have a similar problem. I own a xps L501X with opensuse 11.3. They function keys work, but the brightness stays the same. It appears that the level is going to change but it just blink a little and the level stays the same.
I hope you can help me.
Thanks

10

I can say with upgrading to a new Kernel 2.6.37 or to opensuse 11.4 the brightness control now works out of the box.

I would recomment just to upgrade the Kernel and X11 files. After upgrading to a newer version of Mesa my kde 3D animations are not working any more. >:(

11

Good to hear, but why would you not recommend upgrading to 11.4 (same problem with 3D animations?)?

12

Yes, 3D doesn’t work on my machine, even through it worked with opensuse 11.3 and Kernel 2.6.37. I guess it has something to do with the version of Mesa.

Personally I did upgrade to opensuse 11.4 using KDE with the netbook interface type where you can work quite good without 3D while using Xrender.