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I've been trying to fix this for the past day or so, and I'm not having any luck.
What happens is that, during boot, Arch will be doing its usual boot thing. When it gets to the 'udev' part, the screen goes blank and won't come back on by itself. By blank, I don't mean that it goes black; the backlight turns off rendering it effectively powerless, as if it wasn't on.
So far, the only way for me to get it turned back on is to issue the following command as root:
setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=00(The '00' at the end is the brightness. 00=brightest, FF=dullest.)
Adding 'nomodeset' to the boot line stops the screen from blanking, but then I can't use X. For the most part, adding 'i915' and/or 'agp_intel' to mkinitcpio.conf has no effect, with the one exception that after doing so, I can add 'acpi=off' to the boot line, which breaks both my ability to use X and kills access to my wifi card.
'video=SVIDEO-1:d' doesn't do anything either.
Further, even after issuing the aforementioned command to turn the backlight back on, it turns off every time I close the laptop lid and I need to re-issue the command to turn it back on (I've put it in a script, making this a little less painful).
I know that the card works well enough with older kernels. With whatever ships with Debian 6.0 (Squeeze), it works flawlessly -- 2.6.32 I believe.
Does anyone know how to un-break this in Arch? Any magic boot options that won't do more harm than good?
I'm using an Acer Aspire 5734Z-4836, Intel GMA 4500M graphics. Arch x86. xf86-video-intel is the driver I'm going with, though I've tried xf86-video-devel as well and it made no difference at all.
Update: If I close the laptop lid after the 'udev' part and wait for it to get done loading everything, it comes back on if I re-open the lid. I'm not sure how long one has to wait, but I waited about 20-30 minutes for reasons having nothing to do with testing. Closing the lid and re-opening after this still results in a blank screen. Issuing setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=FF (turning backlight all the way down), and then closing/opening it also does nothing; still blank.
Last edited by seeks (2012-08-02 00:51:12)
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Alright, I managed to work out a kludgy way around this.
Long story short: Wrote a Python script that calls the command listed earlier if the device's 'config' file doesn't show the correct brightness. Runs in the background sort of as a daemon, checking every 3 seconds. Not ideal, but it works.
For the script, I put it up on my site in addition to a couple of other files needed to turn it into a 'proper' daemon. The daemon script was copied from https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=107461 and modified only slightly for my thing.
The tarball: http://www.someplacedumb.net/misc/fixbl-0.8.tar.bz2
For instructions on getting it working, check the README.
Last edited by seeks (2012-08-17 12:01:23)
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I had this probem myself with my Acer Aspire 5336 (Intel Celeron 900 / Intel GMA 4500M / 2GB DDR3 RAM - upgraded to G.Skill 4GB DDR3). It was very annoying only being able to see the prompt or DE in very bad resolution (KDE in my case) with the nomodeset kernel line option. Actually, I need this option to boot every Live CD (BackTrack 5 and KDE Partition Manager are worth mentioning as exceptions); not only Arch Linux. I'm glad petantik referred me to this post with the exact problem I had, thanks!
With the recent changes in Arch Linux changing from initscripts to systemd, the option of running a daemon was out of my league. I thought of enabling a service was the best option.
So I wrote a service and named it fixbl.service. I just made seeks' script executable and fixbl.service spawn it by enabling the service. Everything went okay next time I booted; finally!
Here is the tutorial with the exact same steps I did:
1.- Download 'seeks' script+daemon from post #2 in this thread.
2.- Carefully check README file in it, as it describes how to identify the screen as a device in your system and how to specify the frequency you want the script to check the screen is turned of to turn it on again. My device location was the same one and didn't modified the 3 sec check time so I really didn't had to change anything in blchecker.py but this might not be your case. Ignore the fact of using a daemon since we're going to set up a systemd service to make the script work.
3.- Paste the service below into a new plain text file and name it fixbl.service e.g.
# This is a systemd service to make the script written by user 'seeks'
# at the Arch Linux forums. It doesn't run the daemon itself but the
# script since initscripts support was dropped for Arch Linux to start
# using systemd
#
# He himself wrote the script and the daemon from the daemon user 'Demon' wrote
# in the thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=107461
#
# So original 'Fix Background Light' script and daemon
# thread is: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=146206[Unit]
Description=Check if screen backlight is on every 3 secs.[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/blchecker[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
4.- As described in the README file:
Got it all set up? Cool. Now copy the file to /usr/bin while leaving off the
.py extention:cp blchecker.py /usr/bin/blchecker
5.- And:
Now, mark all three of the recently copied files executable.
chmod +x /usr/bin/blchecker
6.- Copy fixbl.service file created before to /etc/systemd/system directory
cp fixbl.service /etc/systemd/system/fixbl.service7.- Enable the service by running
systemctl enable fixbl.service8.- After system creating two symlinks (which is a good sign), you should be good to go. Reboot your computer to see if everything works properly.
And now some feedback just in case you may think this could make your system unstable, your graphic chipset blow up the laptop or something worst: After almost 1 day of start running this script and service plus booting a couple times, I havent experienced any kind of problem. It just did what it has to do, which is to keep the screen backlight on while booting.
I hope to have explained this as clear as possible for other users. Don't hesitate to drop me an email for whatever someone may need. Many thanks to MrElendig as well for his patience and for keeping me away from messing up my system. Cheers!
Juan Antonio Cánovas
Spanish Arch Linux community team
www.archlinux-es.org || Comunidad Hispana de Arch Linux
about.me
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