xorg-driver-ati Digest, Vol 78, Issue 31

[Alex Deucher]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:41 PM, James Cobban
<webmaster at jamescobban.net> wrote:
> On 13-02-22 03:52 PM, Alex Deucher wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 3:39 PM, James Cobban <webmaster at jamescobban.net>
> wrote:
>
> Please I STILL need to know what command to issue to the Xorg driver to turn
> on the light on my laptop when I open the lid!  If the answer is RTFM, then
> tell me where the FM is!
>
> There is no command.  The driver should take care of it.  If it's not
> working, you'll need to file a bug:
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org
> However to properly debug we'll need to know if you tried any of the
> suggestions from my previous email and whether any of them helped.
>
> Alex
>
> It is frustrating for you to repeat about how "The driver should take care
> of it."  When the driver is NOT taking care of it.
>
> It does not make sense that it is a bug.  The driver correctly opens the
> display on a reboot.  The only time it doesn't is on opening the lid.  But
> the driver has to be TOLD the lid has opened, and there is nothing in the
> lid.sh script that is doing that.  Certainly the proprietary driver has to
> be told.  The Xorg driver is behaving EXACTLY like the proprietary driver
> does if you don't run the aticonfig script to update the lid.sh script and
> add the command to TELL the driver to turn the light on.  Furthermore if it
> was a bug surely I would not be the only person in the world who is
> encountering this problem.
>
> I already told you that trying to set the brightness did nothing.  The
> problem is not the brightness it is that the flourescent light bulb that
> illuminates the LCDs is not being turned on!
>
> This is a pain because every time it happens I have to reconfigure my system
> back to the proprietary driver before I can get any work done, including
> posting to this mailing list, to ask what to do next.
>
> Switching drivers is non-trivial.  I do not want to switch back to the Xorg
> driver until I have something concrete that I can do because not being able
> to close the lid of my laptop is a show stopper.

Lets take a step back here.  I was under the assumption that you were
talking about suspend and resume.  Is that not the case?  Are you
talking about closing the lid and not suspending?  Some oems generate
an acpi lid event when you open/close the lid.  Userspace can then do
some action when this event is generated: suspend, blank the display,
etc.  While this is less common on modern systems, some oems have bios
code that messed with the display hardware directly to blank/unblank
the displays behind the OS's back.  So what exactly are you doing?  If
you want to just blank/unblank the display on lid events, you could do
something like:
blank:
xset dpms force off
unblank:
xset dpms force on

Normally this is handled automatically by your desktop environment
(gnome, kde, etc.) based on the behavior you've selected for lid
events (usually suspend/resume or blank/unblank).

Alex