Any help for brightness and fan/cpu control on a Samsung Q1?
Posted: 25 Jul 2010, 13:26
Hello people,
I have a Q1 (not Q1 Ultra) running Mint 9 which probably conforms to Ubuntu Lucid for anything mentioned here. I realise this computer may not quite fit in the scope of this forum but it seems to me that some things may carry over.
1.
The main issue I have is I can't control backlight brightness from within the OS. In the BIOS menu (updated to 20MA firmware, the last given on the Samsung website, but from 2007...) I can choose between 'Auto' and 'User controlled'. In principle one should be able to adjust brightness from within the OS in either case, but since I can't my only choices are 100% brightness all the time (AC and battery) with 'User controlled' and 100% on AC, +-50% on battery with 'Auto'.
Within the OS, the brightness applet says "Cannot get laptop panel brightness"; in Power Management there are no sliders to adjust and the 'Reduce backlight brightness' checkbox for battery mode doesn't change anything; moving the brightness sliders in Ubuntu Tweak does nothing; using brightness keys (Fn+up/down) does nothing.
Brightness adjustment was available (though a bit fickle) back when I had Mint 7 installed; but it may also be due to not having done the firmware upgrade yet back then. Also, it would seem that backlight fading is possible currently as it happens automatically before the screensaver kicks in; I just have no control over it myself.
I followed the steps to install samsung-tools in hopes that it would install useful kernel modules or whatever is missing on my system. No luck though - I could now switch the backlight on or off altogether, but none of the 'sliding' controls mentioned worked.
Then I installed/reinstalled phc-intel following this post but that didn't help, and now samsung-tools -a gives me "Backlight is disabled" and everything else "is not available" :/
2.
Even before the phc-intel install samsung-tools only picked up on backlight and bluetooth. It would also be great to have control over the fan so as to be able to enable "silent mode" as in Windows. Under Mint 7 I could use the CPU frequency scaling applet to slow down the CPU (not the same thing exactly as fan control though?), but now I'm told "Frequency scaling unsupported".
Ideas on either or both issues will be very welcome. Many thanks!
I have a Q1 (not Q1 Ultra) running Mint 9 which probably conforms to Ubuntu Lucid for anything mentioned here. I realise this computer may not quite fit in the scope of this forum but it seems to me that some things may carry over.
1.
The main issue I have is I can't control backlight brightness from within the OS. In the BIOS menu (updated to 20MA firmware, the last given on the Samsung website, but from 2007...) I can choose between 'Auto' and 'User controlled'. In principle one should be able to adjust brightness from within the OS in either case, but since I can't my only choices are 100% brightness all the time (AC and battery) with 'User controlled' and 100% on AC, +-50% on battery with 'Auto'.
Within the OS, the brightness applet says "Cannot get laptop panel brightness"; in Power Management there are no sliders to adjust and the 'Reduce backlight brightness' checkbox for battery mode doesn't change anything; moving the brightness sliders in Ubuntu Tweak does nothing; using brightness keys (Fn+up/down) does nothing.
Brightness adjustment was available (though a bit fickle) back when I had Mint 7 installed; but it may also be due to not having done the firmware upgrade yet back then. Also, it would seem that backlight fading is possible currently as it happens automatically before the screensaver kicks in; I just have no control over it myself.
I followed the steps to install samsung-tools in hopes that it would install useful kernel modules or whatever is missing on my system. No luck though - I could now switch the backlight on or off altogether, but none of the 'sliding' controls mentioned worked.
Then I installed/reinstalled phc-intel following this post but that didn't help, and now samsung-tools -a gives me "Backlight is disabled" and everything else "is not available" :/
2.
Even before the phc-intel install samsung-tools only picked up on backlight and bluetooth. It would also be great to have control over the fan so as to be able to enable "silent mode" as in Windows. Under Mint 7 I could use the CPU frequency scaling applet to slow down the CPU (not the same thing exactly as fan control though?), but now I'm told "Frequency scaling unsupported".
Ideas on either or both issues will be very welcome. Many thanks!