Asus EEE PC 1005PE Brightness keys change dimming randomly

[MilitantPotato]

I'm using Karmic, non net-book remix.

I've looked around google for the past few hours and found nothing, sorry if I missed a fix.

When changing the brightness via Fn+f5/f6 the brightness changes randomly. It does the same when moving the slider in gnome power manager. Is there a fix for this somewhere?

It makes the dim when idle feature completely useless, since the screen gets brighter.

Thanks in advance,
Jason

[MilitantPotato]

First as last bump. If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

[anaconda]

Have you tried this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=881241

[finnk]

this will make the brightness keys work:
sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Find the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and add "acpi_osi=Linux" so it looks like this GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi=Linux". Save the file. Now run update-grub2.

sudo update-grub2

But gnome power manager still randomly changes the backlight. I disabled it from startup, and start it from the command line when i want to suspend on closing the lid.

[anaconda]

Thanks finnk!
That works in my asus eee 1005P too..

How did you figure that out? I googled for hours without finding a solution.

And I was researching a completely different approach, with using xbacklight and xgamma, which both work too..

[MilitantPotato]

Good stuff Finnk.

Gnome power manager is still sorta screwy, cycles through the brightness levels 3 times, but at least there some order to it. Thanks a lot! FN keys work perfectly though.

Other than having to manually make a fancontrol file and a network issue leaving standby, ubuntu has been nearly flawless on the EEEPC for me. Great job all the devs out there.

[finnk]

@anaconda
I got it from this debian wiki:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Model/1005pe

@MilitantPotato
I haven't thought about the fan control, does it by default run at constant speed? How does your fan control file look like, and where do you put it?

[MilitantPotato]

My fan ran at ~3950 rpm constantly, hovering around 54C.

here's my /etc/fancontrol
/etc/fancontrol:
INTERVAL=2

FCTEMPS=hwmon1/pwm1=hwmon0/temp1_input
FCFANS=hwmon1/pwm1=hwmon1/fan1_input
MINTEMP=hwmon1/pwm1=64
MAXTEMP=hwmon1/pwm1=80
MINSTART=hwmon1/pwm1=10
MINSTOP=hwmon1/pwm1=0

It's not perfect, but it idles with the fan off and saves a noticeable amount of battery. Kicks up to full speed around 67C.

I had to make the settings myself since pwmconfig didn't detect any fans.

/etc/init.d/fancontrol setup: http://pastebin.com/CRTBwbfe
'sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/fancontrol /etc/rc3.d/S99fancontrol' for it to start at boot
'sudo chmod 0755 /etc/init.d/fancontrol' so it executes.

I'm not sure where I got all the scripting for that, found it on google after a few hours of searching.

[Autodave]

Good stuff Finnk.

Gnome power manager is still sorta screwy, cycles through the brightness levels 3 times, but at least there some order to it. Thanks a lot! FN keys work perfectly though.

Other than having to manually make a fancontrol file and a network issue leaving standby, ubuntu has been nearly flawless on the EEEPC for me. Great job all the devs out there.

Replying to you and all others with Asus netbooks and even notebooks........you might want to look into EEEBUNTU. This was put together for Asus netbooks since there was so much trouble configuring everything like wi-fi, sound, function keys, etc. Custom kernel that just seems to work on Asus machines with extremely little if any configuring. On my 900 netbook, everything worked perfectly right from the install except for my sound which required moving the sliders to the proper position which took almost 30 seconds to figure out. The EEEBUNTU uses Ubuntu 9.04.

[dpwegener@gmail.com]

this will make the brightness keys work:
sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Find the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and add "acpi_osi=Linux" so it looks like this GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi=Linux". Save the file. Now run update-grub2.

sudo update-grub2

But gnome power manager still randomly changes the backlight. I disabled it from startup, and start it from the command line when i want to suspend on closing the lid.

After making this change, the brightness still wasn't completely consistent and there was never a popup showing the brightness level on the screen. Adding "acpi_backlight=vendor" to grub solved the problem completely. Now, the brightness changes as expected and you see the brightness level popup.

My GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line now looks like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor splash"