Brightness keys on Lenovo not working, but had them working on other distros with....

[JaSauders]

Hi there. Long time Ubuntu user here trying out Fedora 19 beta so far and absolutely loving it. Only hangup I'm having so far is with my brightness keys. I ended up finding out some information via Arch's wiki/forums and used that alteration in my grub file, which was basically this here:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=\"!Windows 2012\""

For what it's worth, here's my full grub file - http://pastebin.com/jwdPG0Ei

Then just update-grub and reboot and it was fine. I'm having some difficulty here doing that as for one, the grub file looks different than what I'm used to. Secondly, update-grub is not a valid command. What is the equivalent to update-grub in Fedora? Can anybody make sense of the !Windows 2012 entry and how I would apply it?

Also, while I'm here, I have a few questions about Fedora in general on my particular laptop. I have a Broadcom wireless card. In the past I've used Broadcom STA driver. When I installed Fedora I enabled RPMFusion. Within the software manager I installed the source files for broadcom-something or another. At the same time, I found someone online who suggested to yum install akmod-wl or something like that. Either way when I rebooted, I had wireless. Here's my question - what is akmod-wl? Also, was downloading the Broadcom source files enough or did akmod-wl fix my wireless?

Also, on this Lenovo I have the usual layout for trackpad/keyboard with the touchpoint and two sets of buttons. The trackpoint buttons are a total of 3... left, middle, right click. If I would hold the middle down before and press up/down on the trackpoint, it would scroll. Here on Fedora 19, it won't scroll. Is there a way to enable that functionality?

Thanks for your help and insight!

EDIT - I found some other sources with people having issues, although they were slightly different than mine. Some users suggested that you need to add your parameter within GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="". On Ubuntu, I had to put it within GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="", but I did not see that in Fedora. So I ended up altering the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" line so it looks as follows:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.md=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.dm=0 vconsole.keymap=us $([ -x /usr/sbin/rhcrashkernel-param ] && /usr/sbin/rhcrashkernel-param || rd.luks=0 vconsole.font=latarcyrheb-sun16 rhgb quiet acpi_osi=\"!Windows 2012\""

Everything else was in there except the acpi_osi=\"!Windows 2012\""

Then afterwards, I ran what seems to be the equivalent of update-grub, which is grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg. Even still, upon rebooting I had nothing. If I press brightness down, it shoots down to 0 instantly in the meter, however my brightness level doesn't actually change. If I press brightness up, suddenly the brightness jumps to 1% and stays there until I reboot.

Any insight? I'd love to give Fedora 19 a real solid test drive but not if I'm locked into 100% brightness indefinitely. Thanks!

EDIT II - So I found this link here:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to...the_TrackPoint

which was to hold the answers to getting my trackpoint to work. I ran the 3 commands manually in the main vertical scrolling box and they worked perfectly. Problem is I cannot get them to automatically start when I log in. It said to put them in .xsessionrc but I'm questioning if Fedora uses .xsessionrc. A quick Google brought up .Xclients as an alternative suggestion, but the link looked old, so I wasn't sure how applicable it was to modern times with versions like F19. What does F19 use in terms of .xsessionrc or something similar so I can paste in these trackpoint commands and have my vertical trackpoint scrolling working?

[JaSauders]

Well look what we have here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=950760



Guess that answers the brightness issue, for now at least. For the time being I just created an .sh script and tagged it to startup applications. But... is this right? Why did .xsessionrc not fly like I expected? Does Fedora use something different?

[JaSauders]

Is nobody else having this issue? Anybody on Fedora 18 or 19 using the Windows 2012 grub parameter without a problem?

[stevea]

Here's my question - what is akmod-wl? Also, was downloading the Broadcom source files enough or did akmod-wl fix my wireless?

The source is only useful IF you are going to build the driver yourself. So the akmod-wl package from rpmfusion was likely the fix.

The rpmfusion akmod-wl type packages not only install the specific driver, but it will pick up new drivers that are compiled for new kernels revs. Periodically Fedora will push a new kernel and it gets installed when you do a "yum update", and all the drivers have to be built for the specific kernel. So the yum update should also pick up any new wl drivers in the rpmfusion repo.

There is a little problem. When Fedora pushes a new kernel rpmfusion will not have the new matching driver binary for that kernel for a few hours to a few days. So you will need to 'yum update' again until you get the new driver to match.

The good news is that fedora leaves 3 kernels by default installed on your system, so you can continue to boot Fedora kernel-3.8.4-NNN.fc19 via the grub menu for a day or two, and then use the new NNN+1 kernel once you get the wifi driver.

[JaSauders]

Thanks for your reply. I'm trying to understand if this would be a rare thing or a typical thing. On average, can I expect to have no wireless on a newly installed kernel? Or are you saying that if I also manually download the source files, that won't be the case and it'll auto-compile for any newly installed kernel?

[adama]

Not sure if this is related, but after a kernel update in January my brightness keys stopped working. I'm running Fedora 18/GNOME with no tweaks on a Thinkpad x230.

Pressing the keys brings up the "brightness" indicator on the screen, so I know the key events are being received.

Oddly, the GNOME extension "Brightness" does let me adjust brightness by dragging a slider. The brightess jumps around as I drag it and it's not a smooth fade but at least I can change the setting from dim to bright, etc.

[JaSauders]

Not sure if this is related, but after a kernel update in January my brightness keys stopped working. I'm running Fedora 18/GNOME with no tweaks on a Thinkpad x230.

Pressing the keys brings up the "brightness" indicator on the screen, so I know the key events are being received.

Oddly, the GNOME extension "Brightness" does let me adjust brightness by dragging a slider. The brightess jumps around as I drag it and it's not a smooth fade but at least I can change the setting from dim to bright, etc.

I'd recommend adding the Windows 2012 parameter to your grub config, as this has worked for my system on many other distros, but as noted above it seems as if Fedora 18/19 is suffering from a bug that has gotten (as far as I can tell) zero attention. This is the only thing keeping me from installing Fedora...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=950760

[adama]

I found a solution. My x230's hardware brightness keys now work fine.

Add acpi_osi="Linux" acpi_backlight="vendor" to your kernel command line.

This will cause the kernel to prefer the vendor driver (in this case, thinkpad_acpi) over the generic acpi interface.

Sadly the GNOME brightness popup's indicator does not work with this, nor does the GNOME shell brightness extension - but who cares?

If you look in /sys/class/backlight how many items are there? I have two entries, intel_backlight and thinkpad_screen now. Before I added the kernel parameter, I had intel_backlight and acpi_video0.

I think GNOME might be confused by the dual entries in there. Mucking around with the settings under intel_backlight does nothing, but under thinkpad_screen and acpi_video0 I could change the brightness etc.

Wonder if there's a way to make the intel_backlight entry go away.

[adama]

Apparently Ubuntu's been tracking this and working on it for a long time. See https://launchpad.net/~kamalmostafa/...l-mjgbacklight

[adama]

Also, http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.lin...oo.user/255182 seems to imply an echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness fixes the acpi_video0 interface (with no kernel parameters!)

[adama]

One more link to others with the identical problem:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=139610

This is definitely a case of multiple drivers providing conflicting backlight control interfaces, and GNOME picking the wrong one. Of course there is no kernel parameter to disable the intel backlight interface in favour of the thinkpad one...

[adama]

Ubuntu's wiki page on the issue is excellent as well: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Debugging/Backlight

[adama]

Okay, here's my final solution. This gives me smooth backlight control again on my Thinkpad x230. Hotkeys work and so does the gnome shell brightness extension.

Put the following line in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor thinkpad-acpi.brightness_enable=0"

Then regenerate your grub2.conf and reboot. On my machine, I ran the following:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

And reboot.

This solution disables the default ACPI brightness control in favour of thinkpad_acpi's backlight control. It then disables the thinkpad_acpi backlight control. This leaves us with ONE active backlight control interface (the intel_brightness one) which works smoothly with hotkeys and GNOME power manager.

Hope this works for you. Post your results!