Laptop lid switch and ACPI

[Norberto Meijome]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 16:28:06 -0500
frzburn <frzburn at gmail.com> wrote:

> I need a hint on how to get my screen turn off (backlight too) on my Dell
> Laptop.
> I have an Inspiron 6400 (e1505), and FreeBSD 6 - amd64.

Hi there,
I am not sure how to switch off the screen on the dell (independent of
ACPI)... in all laptops I've seen, it's fully controlled by the hardware
(bios?). 
Have you got acpi working ? 

If you *do* have ACPI working, and you want to see whether it is firing acpi at
all when you close the lid, you can restart devd in debugging mode:

/etc/rc.d/devd stop
devd -dD

and then try your ACPI events.

Also, you should be able to tell your ACPI module to let you handle the events
manually. For example, with the acpi_ibm.ko, the knob 

dev.acpi_ibm.0.events = 1

tells acpi to pass all acpi messages to devd for handling. Search the logs (in
mobile@ , i believe) - i've posted my config for some sample actions on
different ACPI events.

BTW, you may be able to switch off the display using a user mode application
that is related to your video card. For example, if you have a Radeon card, the
radeontool allows you to switch off the panel and external monitor outputs
(although the ext monitor gets switched on when you switch to X's VT)

HIH,
Beto
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{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome

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