xiphux
11-14-2003, 01:14 PM
I found a way to turn off the lcd's backlight, if anyone's interested in saving power. First, you need the radeontool program, at:
http://fdd.com/software/radeon/
compile it and put it in /sbin. You also need acpid, which is available for pretty much every distribution, but it's here if you need the source package:
http://acpid.sourceforge.net/
so get that up and running. radeontool works by calling "radeontool light on" and "radeontool light off". I wanted to map this to the sleep button (Fn+Esc), but the sleep button is not a toggle button, so you need some way for the program to determine whether to turn the light on or off. So you'll need one last little perl script:
http://halong.dyndns.org/thanhvu/linux/i5100/i5100_files/radeonperl
put that somewhere where root can access it; it doesn't have to be in the PATH. So now we need to set up acpid to recognize the sleep button event and call the right script. The configuration file is /etc/acpi/events/default (at least, it is on mine. It's probably the same as yours.). Edit this file; there should already be a definition for all events to call some script that doesn't do anything. You can get rid of this or leave it; I just got rid of it. now, we need to add this definition:
event=button/sleep
action=/path/to/radeonperl
save, (re)start acpid, and try it with Fn-Esc. The first time, I had to press it twice for it to do anything (the script defaults to off, so the first press switches it on, but the screen's already on. I didn't feel like editing the script to flip it), but subsequent presses worked perfectly.
Mapping it to the lid switch is not that hard either. You wouldn't need the perl script; you'd just need two event definitions, one to call "/sbin/radeontool light off" when the lid switch is pressed, and another to call "/sbin/radeontool light on" when the lid switch is released.
So now I can start up some music or something, press Fn-Esc to switch the light off to save power, and then toggle it again when I need to use the computer. Pretty nifty.
http://fdd.com/software/radeon/
compile it and put it in /sbin. You also need acpid, which is available for pretty much every distribution, but it's here if you need the source package:
http://acpid.sourceforge.net/
so get that up and running. radeontool works by calling "radeontool light on" and "radeontool light off". I wanted to map this to the sleep button (Fn+Esc), but the sleep button is not a toggle button, so you need some way for the program to determine whether to turn the light on or off. So you'll need one last little perl script:
http://halong.dyndns.org/thanhvu/linux/i5100/i5100_files/radeonperl
put that somewhere where root can access it; it doesn't have to be in the PATH. So now we need to set up acpid to recognize the sleep button event and call the right script. The configuration file is /etc/acpi/events/default (at least, it is on mine. It's probably the same as yours.). Edit this file; there should already be a definition for all events to call some script that doesn't do anything. You can get rid of this or leave it; I just got rid of it. now, we need to add this definition:
event=button/sleep
action=/path/to/radeonperl
save, (re)start acpid, and try it with Fn-Esc. The first time, I had to press it twice for it to do anything (the script defaults to off, so the first press switches it on, but the screen's already on. I didn't feel like editing the script to flip it), but subsequent presses worked perfectly.
Mapping it to the lid switch is not that hard either. You wouldn't need the perl script; you'd just need two event definitions, one to call "/sbin/radeontool light off" when the lid switch is pressed, and another to call "/sbin/radeontool light on" when the lid switch is released.
So now I can start up some music or something, press Fn-Esc to switch the light off to save power, and then toggle it again when I need to use the computer. Pretty nifty.