Blanking the Display on Dell Inspiron 8200

Hey there,
I have got a Dell Inspiron 8200 and several problems with powermanagement. 

With APM:
- info-managements 
- as well as the suspend to ram 
- the function keys for entering setup and suspend state

work well.

what doesn't work with kernel 2.6.6/7 is shutting off the display backlight.
When I press Fn+D the display switches off and immediatly on again.

With ACPI:
- infos 
- interrupt management

work well.

The function keys don't work at all neither using the A10 Bios DSDT from 
acpi.sourceforge.net nor using the bios own one. This is why I can't say if 
Blanking the display works.

Switching of the Display while the notebook does non-interactive tasks is much
more important for me than suspend or something like that, so I don't care
if it works with acpi or apm. Since ACPIs interrupt management works quite well
ACPI would be nice though.

Is there a way to tell the kernel to blank (and switchoff) the display from the
userspace without using those function keys (with acpi)? Do you have any 
idea how to enable the function keys? 

Thanks for any help in advance,

David

System Information: 
Linux inspiron 2.6.7 #1 Sat Aug 14 22:24:18 CEST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
Debian GNU/Linux unstable

related packages:
ii  acpid          1.0.3-19       Utilities for using ACPI power management
ii  kernel-source- 2.6.7-3        Linux kernel source for version 2.6.7 with D
ii  i8kutils       1.25           Dell Inspiron and Latitude laptop utilities



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