PowerBook Ambiant Light Sensor problem

bcarnazzi

Hi All,

I've installed Gentoo on my Powerbook, lots of things work but the ambiant light sensor for automatic fading of screen and keyboard backlite still not works. I'm in gentoo-dev-source-2.6.10-r6 with pbbuttonsd-0.6.6 (with {LCD,KBD}_AutoAdjust = yes in /etc/pbbuttonsd.conf).

Altough, my kernel logs says :

puggy · Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 9:29 am Post subject:

Do you have the relevant support in your kernel?
Such as "Backlight control for LCD screens" in the "Macintosh device drivers" of the "drivers" section of the kernel configuration.

Puggy
_________________
Where there's open source , there's a way.

bcarnazzi · Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 9:54 am Post subject:

Yes, I got it in my kernel conf, but this options seems to offer an interface for LCD backlight control. With pbbuttonsd, for example, my screen dim after 1 minute of inactivity. So I think this point is ok. But the screen & keyboard don't react on ambiant light. Is there a special item in the kernel to activate it ? or a user-space program ? Does yours works ?

puggy · Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 10:39 am Post subject:

Yeah, mine works. pbbuttonsd should be enough to get it working, have you got it setup in the pbbuttonsd config? Does dmesg say anything useful?
_________________
Where there's open source , there's a way.

bcarnazzi · Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 10:47 am Post subject:

In my first post, I put what I think it is relevant in kernel messages about keyboard backlite (mnca backlite controller) : is that the light sensor ? In my pbbuttonsd, I already have KBK_AutoAdjust & LCD_AutoAdjust setted to yes... Can you put your dmesg here to see if there is something usefull that I don't have ?

Thanks.

gnomeza · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Dec 2003 Posts: 97

hmm, indeed I've just noticed that the light-sensors do not work with my current kernel (development-sources-2.6.9-rc3 + Ben's sleep patch #7).

Running pbbuttonsd-0.6.6.
CONFIG_PMAC_BACKLIGHT=y

dmesg says:

bcarnazzi · Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 11:01 am Post subject:

I have gentoo-developpement-source 2.6.9 and 2.6.10 without Ben's sleep patch (what's this ?) and none works

My pbbuttonsd doesn't inform me about LMU (not found ?)
when I try :

bcarnazzi · Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 2:17 pm Post subject:

I realized that there is a 'I2C support > Hardware sensor chip support' menu in my 2.6.10 kernel with nothing in it. Is the driver living there ?

gnomeza · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 31 Dec 2003 Posts: 97

The failure of the ambient light sensor (on all systems accessing the sensor through /dev/i2c-[0-3]) was caused by a bug in pbbuttonsd (0.6.6 & 0.6.7 iirc).
The latest version of pbbuttonsd fixes it.
(see my post here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2187128-highlight-.html#2187128)