Sam Varshavchik wrote:
I thought that I was going nuts at first, but I confirmed this after
some experimentation: after upgrading one of my laptops to Fedora 8,
the LCD backlight seems to autoadjust itself according to the ambient
light level in the room. This did not happen in Fedora 7.
I left the laptop running, then came back a few minutes later with the
lights off in the room, and the laptop's screen was about half at its
usual brightness. I thought that it was some screensaver at first, but
it wasn't. Uh-oh, is my backlight busted? I turned on the lights in
the room, so I could see better, and immediately the LCD went up to
its full brightness level. I turned the lights off, and a few seconds
later the display dimmed to about a 50% level. WTF?
This is a no-name brand laptop. I have a small widget directly above
the screen that is labeled with a small etched picture of a
microphone. That's, apparently, my laptop's built-in microphone, which
I never used. I discovered that if I cover up the entire microphone
sensor, that triggers the backlight to dim to half power. Looks like I
have an ambient light sensor in there. News to me -- the laptop's ~2
years old, and I never knew about it until now. It apparently didn't
do anything in F7, neither does the dual-booted Win XP pay any
attention to the came, but in F8 it came alive and made its presence
known.
Does anyone know anything about this, and, specifically, if there's
anything in F8 Gnome that lets me tweak this sensor's settings? I
don't see anything going to /var/log/messages when I play with the
sensor. A brief search didn't find anything. I don't see anything in
the Gnome power management menu, except the usual global backlight
levels for AC Power and Battery modes, and I can trigger this sensor
both on AC Power, and battery power, apparently.
Have you considered black electrical tape over the sensor?
