Screen brightness issues

SternGerlachExperiment · 2010-03-20 00:02:29

I have to work in an environment of alternating lighting, and the problem is that I'm not able to get good settings to work with in the dark. I've managed to work out some problems, but for example web pages with light backgrounds are way too bright.

I could use Firefox's settings to override the color settings, but I don't usually want to touch the whole scheme, just the background. My monitor is a low-end model and although I've set brightness and contrast to zero, white is still too bright in the dark.

I'm using KDE4 and it has the ability to dim the desktop, but unfortunately I can't set it to keep the desktop dimmed all the time. I could also use KDE's gamma settings, but it would be tedious to switch back and forth when the lighting changes.

I'd like to have a way to quickly change brightness of the desktop, or at least get rid of the white background on web pages without touching fonts or such. Smartdimmer and xbacklight don't seem to support my hardware.

lagagnon · 2010-03-20 00:20:32

I that a CRT or LCD monitor you have there? If it is a CRT you can take the rear casing off the monitor and adjust the brightness level (usually a small black knob located near a large black flyback transformer).

SternGerlachExperiment · 2010-03-20 00:22:31

LCD. Though I wouldn't dare to touch the insides anyway.

milomouse · 2010-03-20 16:27:19

Well, since you use Firefox to browse anyway, download their "Stylish" add-on and then go to their site userstyles.org/stylish/ (their website is pretty slow though). Here's one for just the background (it's faded blue-grey by default, but you can change it) http://userstyles.org/styles/20049 This is just an example. I guess just browse their "global" styles for something regarding background color. That way you can "toggle" it on and off by their statusbar icon. (Actually, I think it works for Greasemonkey too, and other browsers like Chrome and Opera).

I'm not sure about your hardware, but I made a little script to change brightness for mine. If you use it, you'll need to bind "moodlight -u" (up/brighter) and "moodlight -d" (down/dimmer) to some keys on your keyboard , and if it's not in $PATH, put "sudo" infront of the setpci stuff. http://github.com/milomouse/dotfiles/bl … /moodlight It's not perfect and may not be what you want, but I find it handy for my laptop. If you use xbindkeys, put something like this in your ~/.xbindkeysrc :

"/path/to/moodlight -d"
XF86MonBrightnessDown
"/path/to/moodlight -u"
XF86MonBrightnessUp

Or whatever keys you want to use, in case your keyboard doesn't have the "brightness" keys. It uses the "config" file to remember what your brightness was at. You can add "moodlight -r" to reassert last brightness level, useful to add on startup. And there's a "moodlight -m" to max it out real quick (for whatever reason), though you probably wont need to do that.

EDIT: Hmm, I guess this script wont be any good if you don't use zsh. I'm not sure how to get it to work for bash, maybe you or someone else will change it to your shell syntax.

Anyway, all these are all just ideas, and you may have thought of them before. Others may have better suggestions.

Last edited by milomouse (2010-03-20 17:17:04)

SternGerlachExperiment · 2010-03-21 01:59:46

Thanks for your help!

While that moodlight script (or more specifically the setpci command in the script) failed to work for me, Stylish styles provided much help. I can now easily toggle one of the several available styles when working in the dark.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-03-20 00:02:29

Screen brightness issues

#2 2010-03-20 00:20:32

Re: Screen brightness issues

#3 2010-03-20 00:22:31

Re: Screen brightness issues

#4 2010-03-20 16:27:19

Re: Screen brightness issues

#5 2010-03-21 01:59:46

Re: Screen brightness issues

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