Toshiba sat. M115: lcd brightness and battery power

[mortoss]

Hi,

I' ve installed Kubuntu EE on my toshiba m115 laptop. Almost everything works OOB. CPU scaling needed some tunning but now works greate . Even WiFi astonished me with configuration simplicity. But... There are some problems too:

I have no idea how to control lcd brightnes. It's pretty important when on battery power.. I've googled for weeks after any clue and found nothing that works... (not omnibook, not omke, not even toshiba_acpi, kernel recompilation failed - perhaps because of lack of my experience...) Do You have any ideas what else could be made?

Second strange thing is:
When I turn the laptop off from linux (shutdown command or button). It seems that notebook shuts down (no LEDs, no any sound, etc..) Seems ok? Yes but .. after 24h battery state is ~60%? Why? When powering off from windows - after 24h - battery is 100%? Strange... (pls don't try to proove that I'm confusing stanby and shutdown... Standby in windows is LED indicated etc...)

Thx!

[mortoss]

....overnight test - after shutting down from windows (20h before) - battery remains full ?!?

[darkstar62]

Originally Posted by mortoss Hi, I' ve installed Kubuntu EE on my toshiba m115 laptop. Almost everything works OOB. CPU scaling needed some tunning but now works greate . Even WiFi astonished me with configuration simplicity. But... There are some problems too: I have no idea how to control lcd brightnes. It's pretty important when on battery power.. I've googled for weeks after any clue and found nothing that works... (not omnibook, not omke, not even toshiba_acpi, kernel recompilation failed - perhaps because of lack of my experience...) Do You have any ideas what else could be made? SNIP

I've been seeing the same problem. I've traced down where the brightness value is held (it's in the embedded controller, address 0xA3, taking a value between 0x00 and 0x07), but nothing happens when I change this address. There's something still that has to kick the EC to get it to apply the changes. Not sure what yet though. Anyone have any ideas? For reference, this is a Phoenix, not Toshiba, BIOS.

In theory, using the omnibook module with ectype=14 should work, but because it isn't sending the right "apply" command, it doesn't work.

Just my two cents.

- Cory

[katabatic]

I also have a Toshiba M115 with a Phoenix BIOS.

ANYBODY???

I really need to be able to dim the screen, too! And maybe make the FN hotkeys work.

[katabatic]

Please.

[katabatic]

.

[katabatic]

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[mortoss]

Spaming in this thread won't help. If U are really interested in finding solution as I am - write an email to toshiba. We should be their 'pain in the neck ' They should care about linux community..

[katabatic]

I got it working! I have just read this post: http://www.orangegroove.net/articles...-brightness-2/
and decided to give it a try. I went on the Toshiba website and got the BIOS update for my model (M115-S3094). The update requires Windows to either write it to a disk or to update directly. I did the direct Windows option from their program as I dual-boot.

After update, I did

cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

and got:

levels: 75 35 10 25 35 50 60 75 90 100
current: 0

Those are the brightness levels.

So, I did:

echo 10 | sudo dd of=/proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

to set the level to 10

And it freakin worked! I hope this helps and works for you. I'm not sure if it was the BIOS update, but I assume so. I don't think I tried this before updating.





If you would like to change the brightness automatically when the battery is used, you can use a simple script.

Here is how I did it:

Using sudo nautilus or sudo konqueror and sudo gedit or sudo kate will make it easy.

I had to turn on laptop-mode by going to /etc/default/acpi-support and making ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=TRUE
I've read it could also be in /etc/defaults/acpi-settings

Then, go to /etc/laptop-mode/batt-start and batt-stop

And put in a script in batt-start containing:

echo 10 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

And a similar one in batt-stop containing

echo 90 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

Or any value you want for brightness.

Now, right-click each script, Properties, and check "Is executable" or something similar as I am in Kubuntu. May need to reboot now

[mortoss]

Thanks!!!!

After flashing bios - 'made for vista' - changing brightness works in ubuntu Thanks again!


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