N130, Few Issues with the Scripts...

[envalin]

I have to thank you very much for providing so much in the way of tools for the Samsung netbooks and such for one. But I am having a few issues now... (using Kubuntu 10.04)

The brightness tool seems to go a little bit crazy... Fn+Up/Down causes it to gradually go down over a course of about a second. Pressing Fn+Up and then Fn+Down (or something like this) causes it to sit there and go up and down until it finally evens out. I don't know how else to explain this, haha. This has been uninstalled for the time being, as it would appear like it was flickering and it was annoying me, but any thoughts would be great.

Wireless is finnicky. I am trying to figure out what conditions cause it not to work on login, but I seem to have issues when I turn it on the first time with the wireless not working at all. On a restart, it works again, but starting up the first time in a while (a while being 15 minutes or so) seems to not allow it to recognize the wireless.

Any ideas on what's going on? This is the closest I've gotten to having a working netbook since I got it for Christmas, so again, thank you very much for your work!

[voria]

The brightness tool seems to go a little bit crazy... Fn+Up/Down causes it to gradually go down over a course of about a second. Pressing Fn+Up and then Fn+Down (or something like this) causes it to sit there and go up and down until it finally evens out. I don't know how else to explain this, haha. This has been uninstalled for the time being, as it would appear like it was flickering and it was annoying me, but any thoughts would be great.

What brightness tool are you referring to? On my NC10 and Kubuntu I can't control the brightness level by using the FN keys because of bug (take a look here for more info). I don't know if your problem is related to this one. Anyway, can you control the brightness level by using the slider in the powerdevil plasma applet?

Wireless is finnicky. I am trying to figure out what conditions cause it not to work on login, but I seem to have issues when I turn it on the first time with the wireless not working at all. On a restart, it works again, but starting up the first time in a while (a while being 15 minutes or so) seems to not allow it to recognize the wireless.

If I'm not wrong the N130 is shipped with a realtek wireless card, right?
Check if anything relevant is written in your 'dmesg' about the wireless.

[mbdub]

Hi
I seem to have a similar problem.
If I click Fn+Up, the brightness goes all the way to the max value.
And if I click Fn-Down, the brightness goes all the way to min.
It stops there however, and the keyboard is perfectly functional afterwards,
so this does not seem to be the old key release problem exactly.
The slider on the Battery Widget works ok but kind of jerky.
Xbacklight works correctly. setpci trick works as well.

If I reassign brightness control to Meta-Up and Meta-Down, then everything works fine
(although the jerkiness of the slider remains)

This is with samsung-backlight package.
Without it, the slider works better but the keyboard control does not work at all,
even re-assigned to Meta-Up/Down.

Tried to use the acpi_backlight=vendor trick but did not help.

Strangely, before the upgrade, on Kubuntu 9.04, brightness worked even without the samsung-brightness package, although I had to re-assign it to Meta-Up/Down. In 10.4, as I said above, it stopped working out-of-the-box, only with samsung-brightness.

My details:
N140
Kubuntu 10.4
the latest kernel 2.6.32-22 from ppa1
all samsung-* packages and udev packages that I could find
latest bios 05CU

Any ideas on how to fix the keys?
If you need any more info, let me know.

(Great job by the way with the rest of the packages, thank you)

[voria]

Check the behaviour of Fn-Up and Fn-Down by using the 'xev' command line utility, just to be sure it's not still the old problem with keys release...
If they work good with xev, then the problem must be (again) in KDE.

[mbdub]

According to xev,
If Fn-Up is not assigned to anything, then everything is cool:

KeyPress event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x3200001,
root 0x101, subw 0x0, time 1673347, (-219,-234), root:(623,184),
state 0x0, keycode 233 (keysym 0x1008ff02, XF86MonBrightnessUp), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x3200001,
root 0x101, subw 0x0, time 1673347, (-219,-234), root:(623,184),
state 0x0, keycode 233 (keysym 0x1008ff02, XF86MonBrightnessUp), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

However, if Fn-Up is assigned to "Increase Screen Brightness" in KDE, then the following events happen several times until the brightness hits max. (There is a small popup slider showing brightness level going up which might be responsible for "focus" events.)

KeyRelease event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x3200001,
root 0x101, subw 0x0, time 1715333, (-251,-60), root:(591,358),
state 0x2, keycode 233 (keysym 0x1008ff02, XF86MonBrightnessUp), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

FocusOut event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x3200001,
mode NotifyGrab, detail NotifyAncestor

FocusIn event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x3200001,
mode NotifyUngrab, detail NotifyAncestor

KeymapNotify event, serial 35, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
keys: 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0

KeyRelease .. etc as above several times ..

Not sure what this means though.
Does this make anything clearer ?

[voria]

Well, I'm pretty sure this is a KDE bug, so the only thing you can do now is to file a new bug report on launchpad and hope for a fix.

[mbdub]

Btw, would you know by any chance if there is a way to configure the minimum brightness level.

For some reason, if I use 'setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=XX' then I can make the screen much darker then the minimum level of the screen brightness slider (or xbacklight 0). Is there a setting somewhere what brightness the minimum level corresponds to?

[voria]

According to the original 'samsung-backlight' sources, there are 256 (!) levels for brightness, while by using the module the number of levels is 8.
From the source code:

/*
* HAL/gnome-display-manager really wants us to only set 8 different levels for
* the brightness control. And since 256 different levels seems a bit
* overkill, that's fine. So let's map the 256 values to 8 different ones:
*
* userspace 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
* hardware 31 63 95 127 159 195 223 255
*
* or hardware = ((userspace + 1) * 32)-1
*
* Note, we keep value 0 at a positive value, otherwise the screen goes
* blank because HAL likes to set the backlight to 0 at startup when there is
* no power plugged in.
*/

So, if for instance you want to set the same brightness as level 2 when using the kernel module, you should use 95 as value for setpci.

[mbdub]

I see, that explains it.
My problem is that, on my netbook, the hardware=31 level is too bright.
I understand your rationale not to start from 0 (and even 1 is almost off).
But maybe some of the lower values like 5 would be a better match for userspace=0.
Something like
hardware 5 -- userspace 0
hardware 255 -- userspace 7
and the rest is linearly spread.
What do you think?

[voria]

Well, things are changed now, the current 'samsung-backlight' available on the repository is the one from the 'easy-slow-down-manager' project (link).
Now the driver talks directly to the BIOS to handle brighness, so I don't know if there is any way to change the default levels.

[Alexey]

Well, things are changed now, the current 'samsung-backlight' available on the repository is the one from the 'easy-slow-down-manager' project

I see that only samsung-tools is recently updated on repository... Not the samsung-backlight.

[voria]

I mean, things are changed in lucid.
The 'samsung-backlight' provided on the repository for lucid is the one from the 'easy-slow-down-manager' project, while the 'samsung-backlight' provided for karmic is the original one.

[Alexey]

I understood now.
By the way, I install xubuntu-desktop (XFCE), and there regulation of brightness works in the logon screen (OSD is working). But after logon in the system, stops to be regulated.
Also I tried lubuntu-desktop (LXDE), and there brightness regulation is working fine!

[voria]

The brightness regulation is managed by gnome-power-manager.
From what you have described, I think xubuntu uses gdm as login manager, which in turn uses gnome-power-manager for power control (and the brightness control works).
Once you log in, gnome-power-manager is stopped and so the brightness keys stop to work.

I don't know if this is the intended behaviour with xubuntu (I've never used it), anyway you can try to manually start gnome-power-manager from a terminal and check if the keys work again.

[Alexey]

When I log in at the xubuntu, both "gnome-power-manager" and "xfce4-power manager" is starting. I also tried to use only one of them, and was no changes. Now I uninstalled gnome-power manager and left only XFCE4-power-manager, because there was a conflict between them.