laptop backlight control with X

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

Louis E Garcia II <louisg00 at bellsouth.net> writes:
> On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 22:02 -0400, Tony Nelson wrote:
>> On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 18:45 -0400, Louis E Garcia II wrote:
>> > I noticed that the backlight on my laptop will turn off in 20 min of
>> > inactivity. How do I change this to 10 min? I fiddled with
>> > gnome-power-manager but didn't help. Is this an X setting?
>> > 
>> > -Louis
>> 
>> It's part of xscreensaver, if that's installed.  Don't know about
>> gnome-screensaver (sp?).
>
> gnome-screensaver has nothing for dpms, not even in gconf. xscreensaver
> is not installed. Would it be hard coded in X?

You can adjust it in xorg.conf or with xset(1).  The option lines
below do the magic.  For CRT monitors I like to stagger the times a
bit to minimize thermal cycling damage.  blank/standby/suspend/off get
set to 10/11/12/13 minutes.  For laptop LCD's it hardly matters.  I
just turn the sucker off in one go and with a shorter timeout.

>From my fc5 xorg.conf file:

Section "ServerLayout"
#	Identifier     "Default Layout"
	Identifier     "ancho, ATI Radeon-200M,builtin WXGA LCD"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
	InputDevice    "Synaptics" "CorePointer"
	InputDevice    "Mouse0" "AlwaysCore"

	# added these next 4 -wsr
	# LCD monitors seem to only have two modes, on/off
	# don't bother going through all the intermediate modes.
	Option		"blank time"	"5"	# 5 minutes
	Option		"standby time"	"0"     # disable
	Option		"suspend time"	"0"     # disable
        Option		"off time"	"5"	# same as blank time.
EndSection

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht                http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/