More on Toshiba A305 SP6926A

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 05:12:24AM -0700, Leonardo M. Ramé wrote:

> A new issue I found is I can't control screen brightness & contrast. This
> machine has this control in Windows by clicking the [FN Key]+F6/F7.
> 
> Does anyone knows how to enable this in FreeBsd?

If it is not something you can enable in your BIOS, i.e. if this feature needs
OS support then you should do the following.

Check if your window manager/desktop environment has an applet for this. If it
does, that will presumably take care of the details. If it doesn't you'll have
to figure it out yourself as indicated below.

Use 'xrandr --prop|less' to see if your display supports the backlight
property. If it doesn't you can forget about controlling the brightness AFAIK
and skip the rest of this post.

Install the x11/xbacklight port. This should enable you to set the backlight
level using the RandR extension, if your hardware supports it.

Next you need to know if your keyboard setup actually detects the FN
key. Start the xev program from a terminal window, and move your mouse pointer
into the xev window. You'll see a lot of mouse events scrolling through the
terminal window. Now press the Fn key, and see if it registers in the terminal
window. If it doesn't you need to use other key combinations (like just the
F6/F7 keys).

Next you need to look at your window manager documentation how to link
keypresses to executing commands, so that is calls e.g. 'xbacklight --inc 10'
and 'xbacklight --dec 10' when the right buttons are pressed. This might be
called a 'key binding' or a 'hotkey'.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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