Ambient light level sensor in Fedora 8???
Sam Varshavchik
mrsam at courier-mta.com
Sun Nov 11 18:13:46 UTC 2007
I thought that I was going nuts at first, but I confirmed this after some
experimentation: after upgrading one of my laptops to Fedora 8, the LCD
backlight seems to autoadjust itself according to the ambient light level in
the room. This did not happen in Fedora 7.
I left the laptop running, then came back a few minutes later with the
lights off in the room, and the laptop's screen was about half at its usual
brightness. I thought that it was some screensaver at first, but it wasn't.
Uh-oh, is my backlight busted? I turned on the lights in the room, so I
could see better, and immediately the LCD went up to its full brightness
level. I turned the lights off, and a few seconds later the display dimmed
to about a 50% level. WTF?
This is a no-name brand laptop. I have a small widget directly above the
screen that is labeled with a small etched picture of a microphone. That's,
apparently, my laptop's built-in microphone, which I never used. I
discovered that if I cover up the entire microphone sensor, that triggers
the backlight to dim to half power. Looks like I have an ambient light
sensor in there. News to me -- the laptop's ~2 years old, and I never knew
about it until now. It apparently didn't do anything in F7, neither does the
dual-booted Win XP pay any attention to the came, but in F8 it came alive
and made its presence known.
Does anyone know anything about this, and, specifically, if there's anything
in F8 Gnome that lets me tweak this sensor's settings? I don't see anything
going to /var/log/messages when I play with the sensor. A brief search
didn't find anything. I don't see anything in the Gnome power management
menu, except the usual global backlight levels for AC Power and Battery
modes, and I can trigger this sensor both on AC Power, and battery power,
apparently.
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