How is monitor brightness is controlled ?

[Lawrence Stewart]

On 05/13/12 17:55, Yevgen Krapiva wrote:
> Hi everyone.
>
> Could somebody tell me what thing in FreeBSD is managing the monitor
> brightess ?

Given that the function keys don't work, check if you have any relevant 
sysctl options to play with. Most likely to find them under hw.acpi, but 
try grepping "sysctl -a" output for bright or lcd to see if anything 
comes up.

> I've got Dell Inspiron laptop, FreeBSD 9.0 RELEASE and KDE4.
> Pressing the functional combintation of Fn+F4/F5 does not have any effect.
> In order to understand what's wrong I need to know in what direction I
> should move.

Getting the fn keys working requires some ACPI voodoo I'm not familiar 
with, so I'll have to defer to someone else to advise on that. The info 
at [1] might be a good starting point. The fn keys on my Toshiba R600 
laptop started working only after I loaded the acpi_toshiba.ko kernel 
module. I note there's no similar module for Dell's so getting them 
working will probably require some fiddling.

Cheers,
Lawrence

[1] 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/acpi-debug.html