Bug 747692

Summary:	intel [Pineview] Screen blinks after setting brightness with keyboard keys (Samsung NF310 Netbook )
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 12.1	Reporter:	Miguel Cóias <flajeen>
Component:	X.Org	Assignee:	E-mail List <xorg-maintainer-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	E-mail List <xorg-maintainer-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P3 - Medium	CC:	forgotten_KjUTH09OjI, schaefer.frank
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	openSUSE 12.1
See Also:	https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47286
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Miguel Cóias 2012-02-17 18:00:57 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.77 Safari/535.7

Well, I press the brightness key on my netbook and after some seconds, the brightness of the screen starts going up and down, sometimes the screen gets black. If I press Ctrl+Alt+F2 (switching to console) the following message appears: [128.random numbers] 'ACPI: Failed to switch the brightness'.

.xsession-errors log: http://pastebin.com/Q2uxFYUH
Xorg.0.log log: http://pastebin.com/2mFfLJVA

I have a video of the issue happening, here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEnwQOkcEFY The video isn't public. Tried to switch to console but this time it didn't even react.

In Ubuntu it worked if I installed samsung-tools.
In Arch it worked out-of-the-box.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Press Fn+Up Key (it may be different on other laptops/netbooks
2. Wait some seconds
3.
Actual Results:  
Screen started 'blinking'

Expected Results:  
Brightness should have switched fine.

I have a Samsung NF310 netbook, I have the default theme with openSUSE 12.1 i686 GNOME

Comment 1 Forgotten User KjUTH09OjI 2012-02-17 21:38:34 UTC

Hi,

Most likely you will be needing:

 * samsung-backlight (assuming it supports your model)
 * samsung-tools

None seems to be packaged and I haven't really looked into the license aspects of the thing... but I will see if there's something we can do for this specific case. 

Keep an eye on this thread.

PS: It's nice to help a fellow Portuguese for a change :)

Comment 2 Frank Schäfer 2012-03-07 14:48:45 UTC

I have the same netbook and exactly the same problem.
It seems that closing the battery applet (or is it a plasmoid ? ;-) ) solves the issue. Miguel, can you confirm that ?
Looks like a recursive problem...

BTW: see kde-bug 288852

Comment 3 Frank Schäfer 2012-03-12 14:41:48 UTC

It seems to be a X11 bug.
I can trigger it by changing the brightness with xbacklight.
I also tried changing the brightness with

echo "5" > /sys/class/backlight/samsung/brightness

which works as expected as long as the xserver is not running.
With the xserver running, the brightness changes, but to a random value. dmesg shows the following errors:

ACPI: Failed to switch the brightness

Anyone from openSUSE/Novell willing to take a look at this ?
I think this is a critical bug, because it makes these devices unusable with Linux. Bug 682528 could be related to this.

Comment 4 Frank Schäfer 2012-03-14 19:26:10 UTC

I have created a X11-bug report: 

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47286

Comment 5 Stefan Dirsch 2014-05-22 12:31:35 UTC

openSUSE 12.1 is no longer supported. Hence the issue won't be fixed for this product. In case the issue still is reproducable with a supported product (openSUSE 12.3/13.1 at the moment) or with openSUSE:Factory, please feel free to reopen. Thanks.