Ubuntu

screen dimming, what controls it?

Asked by Ryan Budney

I'm sitting here listening to the radio (on-line) and periodically my screen dims for a second, then perks back up again.

What I want to know is, which program is triggering the dimming? My NVIDIA drivers certainly do the dimming, but I assume something in Ubuntu 7.10 is telling the driver to dim the screen -- because the same drivers in OpenSUSE 10.2 do not dim my screen in the same circumstances. I'm running a Thinkpad t61p. When the laptop is unplugged, the dimming craziness happens quite often. But when it's plugged in, it can go for days without playing with the screen brightness, now it's back at it again. It mostly happens when I am not using the keyboard or mouse.

If you know, please let me know...

Thanks.

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Ryan Budney (delooper) said : 		#1

new development. It seems that Ubuntu is trying to launch X on display 0. The previous periodic flickers were getting more and more frequent, then I got a blue screen that said that "there is already an X server running on display 7, do you really want to start X on display 0?" I repeatedly said no, but the blue screen kept on coming up over and over again.

This might have some connection to another problem. When I boot ubuntu, I get a text prompt (X does not come up on its own, or to be more precise, it crashes.) So I start X up manually with the "startx" command.

I'm tying this in the 2-minute temporal window ubuntu gives me between its attempt to start a 2nd x server on display 0.

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Ryan Budney (delooper) said : 		#2

Perhaps this is unrelated, but now pdftotext and trackerd are running like mad in the background, taking near every spare clock cycle.

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psernetz (patrick-sernetz-com) said : 		#3

Perhaps its the new dim feature from gnome power manager. It dims the display when the computer idles. You can try and disable it.

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Ryan Budney (delooper) said : 		#4

Thanks. Interesting. I had turned the dimming feature off in Gnome Power Manager for AC (wall) power, but I had kept it on for battery power.

Even though my laptop was plugged in, the dimming feature kept on working as if the laptop was running on batteries. I think this happens when I boot the laptop on battery power, then switch to AC power later on.

So it seems there's a problem with Gnome Power Manager, at least.