[olpc-help] how is brightness controlled?

[Paul Fox]

i wrote:
 > smith wrote:
 >  > Paul Fox wrote:
 >  > 
 >  > > if this isn't a known problem, can someone point me to the rough
 >  > > connection between the keyboard brightness keys and the kernel
 >  > > (dcon?) brightness control?  if i knew where to start looking, i
 >  > > might be able to debug this myself.
 >  > 
 >  > Its not a known problem that I know of.   Are running sugar or a 
 >  > different GUI?  The brightness stuff is handled by sugar.
 > 
 > sugar.  the machine is very stock right now.
 > 
 > of course, just now when i started an strace of sugar and then
 > walked over to the machine to push the brightness key, it worked. 
 > i don't think the unit has been rebooted since i last saw it not
 > working, but i have restarted X a couple of times.
 > 
 > i'll see if i can reproduce.


okay -- it's very reproducible.  after a cold boot, the brightness
keys reliably do not work.  all other function keys, including volume,
do work.

i've found the sugar code that (keyhandler.py) which handles the keys,
and have tried inserting some debug lines to be sure i'm getting there,
but i can't figure out where the logging should be going.  where are
sugar's log files?

paul

p.s.  a (presumably) unrelated issue -- it seems that if i shut
the machine down with "shutdown -h now" (when i'm ssh'ed in),
then on the next boot sugar will not start correctly.  i have to
hard-powercycle it (by holding the button) and let it come up
again for it to work.

=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 40.1 degrees)