It’s like defaultly on full brightness and hurts my eyes like crazy. Is there any way to turn down the brightness?
It’s currently broken, but the ordinary keys on your laptop has worked in earlier versions, but it got broken in our latest ACPI upgrade. It’s on the top of my todo-list. I havn’t seen a bug-report on it though, so only way I knew was by word of mouth. So it’s always good to report bugs.
Until it is fixed in software, a possible workaround: my Samsung laptop dims the screen a lot when I run it on battery rather than plugged into the mains. IIRC correctly this was a BIOS setting somewhere in the power saving section.
Sorry for two threads at the top, but has this been fixed yet?
Unfortunatly not yet.
Lowering Brightness is important for energy saving for those who have laptops , so is important to me. 
+1
+1
How about now?
Is there at least some way I can change it via the terminal?
I don’t really care if the shortcut keys work. My Fn key is broken anyways.
Unfortunatly not, while it is easy to implement, I don’t have a working Haiku test environment since I switched laptop and nobody else seems interested in working on it.
… what’s the point in making an OS if you aren’t going to listen to what people want out of it?
… what’s the point in making an OS if you aren’t going to listen to what people want out of it?[/quote]
nitt, please keep in mind that Haiku is still in the alpha stage of development. With such a small group of developers volunteering what little free time they do have, they have to prioritize developing certain features over others first. When Haiku R1 is ready to be released, this feature is pretty much essential to have, but for now it’ll have to take the back seat to more vital features.
I don’t have much spare time and at the moment I find being able to run Haiku at all on my laptop more important.
Feel free to work on it yourself rather than insulting me: http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=f236b941d009620b6b80eae6f39ce778c60031ae
They are working on Haiku in their free time, you’re not paying the developers in any way and can’t demand anything.
They are working on Haiku in their free time, you’re not paying the developers in any way and can’t demand anything.[/quote]
That’s just a cop-out.
I think I have the right to speak intelligence, don’t I?
If you want to make a successful product, you have to implement what makes it usable.
This is simply how things work, and I have the right to say it.
Do you say this to anyone who suggests things who asks for a bug to be repaired?
“You don’t have the right to demand anything from us”?
That’s just a lazy cop-out.
That’s the entire purpose of user feedback.
Don’t be so contentious about things.
Besides, I have already planned to order their Release 1 CD.
That’s not much of a donation, but I don’t have much money. :I
User feedback is great, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a difference between constructive user feedback and getting narky when someone doesn’t do what you want. I understand this thread is ancient, and you’ve been waiting ages for this particular feature, but instead of moaning, why don’t you look at how to code C++ an implement it yourself? As tqh said, there’s many more important issues to solve than adjusting brightness (which is implemented differently on almost every model of laptop), including just getting Haiku to run on his laptop. You have to realise that the development team behind Haiku is small, and just trying to support booting on a wider range of hardware platforms is more important than supporting tweaking brightness with hardware buttons.
The developers have very little personal time to spare. And it could take some time looking to work out the cause of your problem.
If you look at the code itself you don’t even need write a finished polished version that works all by yourself. If you could spend the time to ID where inside the code the problem is, what parameters/LOCs need changing and why. The time saved will help the main line developers in getting to your problem.
Remember you may easily be able to devote hours if not days to the problem, the developers are hard-pressed to find even a few spare hours to look at the problem. Give them the help needed and it may only take the developers a few hours to fix the problem if you give them the RIGHT clues.
Hope you find the cause soon, and get the help you need.
This is a very strange comment. The problem that the poster has reported is that Haiku entirely lacks any support for this stuff. The “cause” is very simple in that sense, nobody ever implemented this. The “right clues” you’re talking about consist of this: Haiku doesn’t have any support for backlight brightness, to properly use most laptops and some integrated displays (e.g. iMac) it should add such support.
NoHaikuForMe: And this means he can not present a suggestion on what needs to be access how?
I don’t know much about what is needed to change screen brightness, and I use the Windows boot/partition to set the brightness on my newer laptop and on my old Dell laptops it could be set thru the BIOS settings. So using Haiku on a dimmed screen has not been a problem to me. Plus I only buy laptops with batteries rated for 8-10 hours for use under Windows. Even without all the power saving features Haiku runs 5-6 hours on such machines.
The big problem seems that there is no universal ways to control screen brightness in laptops.
Point me to something that clearly states how it can be done, and I may even write a user-land program myself. But I am not going to waste days researching how to fix what for me is a minor problem. But find something useful for me to use and I probably will spend the 1-2 days writing something.
Okay, I did a quick Google search. Most of the first page links were worthless as they assume you wanted to download a Windows program to do the job.
But:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=110641
Are two interesting threads that suggest solutions are possible for Haiku users.
The search terms I used were: “hardware control screen brightness in laptops”
Hope the OP takes the ball and runs with it.