LCD brightness in Acer Aspire?

[Capt Turk]

Has anyone figured out how to make the screen brightness buttons work on an Acer Aspire 7741z?

[kjpetrie]

Is that a Radeon video adapter? If so there's a package in the repo - with a big health warning on it.

How brave are you?

[Capt Turk]

Nope!   It's Intel.  I just bought this laptop to get away from ATI anything.  I've had nothing but problems with ATI stuff.

[kjpetrie]

Since replying to your post I've installed pclos on a 5810TG which, according to PCC has both Intel graphics and ATI Radeon HD4330! Not sure what to believe, but 3D works with the Radeon HD 2000 driver, so I suppose that's what it is.

I also can't control the brightness - only turn the light on and off.

[Jaws]

Perhaps changing the keyboard in KCC would help. IIRC, I had to do that with PCLOS 2009 on my Lenovo R61 for some of the function keys to work.

[kjpetrie]

In my case the keys are recognised and the brightness scale appears on screen, but it can't be changed. (I have changed the keyboard setting.) If I boot on battery I get a different brightness from when I boot on mains, so the kernel/acpi can set it, but there's obviously a problem in communication between the two.

[kjpetrie]

Still can't control the brightness, but it doesn't really matter as the LED backlight only consumes about a watt. Much more important to turn all unnecessary devices off to save power. As I've got the TG with the radeon chip that consumes 9W of power even when sitting idle, and pclos has better support for the Intel graphics, that's been a priority for me.

There must be a way, because other distros have managed it. Possibly it needs a custom-compiled kernel.

[Capt Turk]

I'm not worried about how much power the LCD uses, as I always have the laptop plugged in.   I use the laptop for navigation on the tugboat.  At night the screen brightness is blinding. I use a couple of sheets of smoked plastic over the screen to block out a lot of the brightness, but it still isn't enough without being able to decrease the brightness.

I've never found a laptop, even if the control is working right, that will turn down far enough to use at night. I wish I had the room to use an old CRT monitor.  They could be turned down to just the right brightness.

[T6]

i'm interested in this too, i have a toshiba netbook and it seems that the option is controlled by bios because if i let brightness low in xp when i change to pclinux same brightness level is used

not sure what keyboard to select on pcc to do this because some buttons work like sound controls but the rest is not, including wireless, that doesn't work in windows either, bios controls it