Re: Unable to Adjust Screen Brightness on Sony VGN-NR21Z running Suse 10.3

On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 11:19 +0100, William Portal wrote:
> I have bought a copy of Open Suse (310059239/10) and am running it on a=
=20
> Sony VGN-NR21Z.  Mostly it works very well, but one of two things I am=20
> having difficulty with is adjusting the screen brightness.  The screen=20
> brightness controls are the keys (Fn. and F5) to reduce and (Fn. and F6=
)=20
> to increase.  Under Suse 10.3, these controls do not work.  The graphic=
s=20
> card is an NVidia GeForce 8400M GT.  Do you know what I can do to reduc=
e=20
> the brightness?  I have tried installing one suggestion (smartdimmer)=20
> but that did not work.  Do you have any suggestions?
>=20
> If anyone could help, I would be very grateful.  Regards,
> William Portal.

This sounds related to:
=EF=BB=BFSome Fn keys don't work on Sony FS VGN-FS115B
=EF=BB=BFhttps://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3D226122

and
=EF=BB=BFFn F5, Fn F6, Fn F7 does not work on sony vaio vgn-sz71xn
=EF=BB=BFhttps://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3D378720

I always wanted to have a closer look..., but I have absolutely no time
for that currently.

Either the sony acpi driver needs to be extended or the video driver
must be used. The video driver is still blacklisted in 10.3.

Argghh and broken in 11.0, will have to add something ("check whether
the a real device exists for ACPI graphics devices"). But you might
still want to try, this affects Toshibas and you should see a message in
dmesg when the video driver gets loaded if it affects your machine
(tries to access/create the same /proc/acpi/video/video0 path two
times).

You should definitely try 11.0. This is not important enough to ever get
fixed in 10.3.

If the video driver does not work for you, Mattia might be able to help
you or at least point you to a sony project, list or related bugs if
there exists something...

   Thomas