Arch Linux

entodoays

Member

From: Malta

Registered: 2014-10-25

Posts: 118

Activating airplane mode confuses brightness shortcut keys

I discovered a bug but don't really know where it should be reported.

On my Toshiba laptop, there are the following shortcut keys:
Fn + F6 - decrease brightness
Fn + F7 - increase brightness
Fn + F8 - toggle Wi-fi on/off

I rarely use the latter but when I do, something bizarre happens, Fn + F6 starts functioning sometimes as Fn + F8 and vice versa after I reenable the wifi. Normal behaviour is restored seemingly without user intervention. Sometimes the brightness control stops working altogether with shortcut keys and with the slider.

Never had such issues before. It seems an Xorg issue but could be related to Gnome.

I'm using an /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf with the following content:
Section "Device"
        Identifier  "card0"
        Driver      "intel"
        Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
        BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"EndSection

My wifi adapter is: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

entodoays

Member

From: Malta

Registered: 2014-10-25

Posts: 118

Re: Activating airplane mode confuses brightness shortcut keys

I found a solution to this problem. Simply adding

acpi_backlight=vendor

to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line solved the issue. It seems to have rendered the response of the PC to these key presses more rapid.

EDIT
This workaround is buggy. I ended up removing it because it was causing more serious problems (hangups, monitor remains off after wake-up from sleep).

Last edited by entodoays (2015-02-14 09:10:10)

entodoays

Member

From: Malta

Registered: 2014-10-25

Posts: 118

Re: Activating airplane mode confuses brightness shortcut keys

I found that the problem is that sometimes pressing FN + Fx is not enough for the action to be completed. Strangely enough sometimes I have to press and release Fn alone again. This is some bug but don't have a clue to what package I should report it.