You could try the new backlight-brightness program. It runs in the command line. There should be a desktop file for it in beta-2.

Re: xbacklight fails to set screen brightness

BitJam wrote:You could try the new backlight-brightness program. It runs in the command line. There should be a desktop file for it in beta-2.

It works just fine.

Is it possible to feed it a brightness value on the command line so it can be used silently from the desktop-session startup file?

SamK wrote:[backlight-brightness] works just fine

Thanks for testing!

Is it possible to feed it a brightness value on the command line so it can be used silently from the desktop-session startup file?

Good idea. I will look into it. On the live-usb system we record the brightness on shutdown and restore it on startup. The feature you suggest is a good idea for installed systems where the brightness level is not saved.

backlight-brightness

BitJam wrote:

SamK wrote:[backlight-brightness] works just fine

Thanks for testing!

Is it possible to feed it a brightness value on the command line so it can be used silently from the desktop-session startup file?

Good idea. I will look into it. On the live-usb system we record the brightness on shutdown and restore it on startup. The feature you suggest is a good idea for installed systems where the brightness level is not saved.

Thanks.

Some further musings...

A similar app to control the on-screen contrast (gamma?) will make a good companion.

How about a name change to aid remembering and finding?
Potential candidates off the top of my head:

• adjust-screen-brightness
• adjust-screen-contrast
• screen-brightness-adjust
• screen-contrast-adjust

i would call it backlight-something or even xbacklight-something, (where"something" is one other word) just because people are used to xbacklight.

xbacklight-brightness would be easier to find with autocomplete, but would otherwise be misleading. wheres beta-2? couldnt find it on the sf page.

backlight-brightness

figosdev wrote:i would call it backlight-something or even xbacklight-something, (where"something" is one other word) just because people are used to xbacklight.

The xbacklight app will remain available along with the new app so people who want to use xbacklight will be able to using that name. In such a case it probably is not neccessary to try to link the name of a new app to the name of an existing app that performs a similar function.

If the contrast app is developed, it seems appropriate to give that app a name which associates it with the new app name, because in the mind of a user they both adjust the screen. For the potential contrast app, the name (x)backlight is not a good fit for that.

backlight-brightness

BitJam wrote:There should be a desktop file for it in beta-2.

I suppose one way of thinking about this app (and potentially a contrast adjusting companion) is the visual equivalent of of alsamixer for audio. In that way it might be worth considering adding it to the Control Centre (a la alsamixer) and producing the .desktop file hidden (a la alsamixer). This seems a consistent approach and still enables the user to unhide the menu entry via Menu Manager (a la alsamixer).

i didnt know you could hide .desktop files from the menu and unhide them, thats cool.

backlight-brightness

BitJam wrote:

SamK wrote:Is it possible to feed it a brightness value on the command line so it can be used silently from the desktop-session startup file?

Good idea. I will look into it. On the live-usb system we record the brightness on shutdown and restore it on startup. The feature you suggest is a good idea for installed systems where the brightness level is not saved.

For a conventional installed to disk system, saving the value to a file at shutdown should also be fine. An entry in the startup file could just read the value. The advantage of this approach is when the user is initially trying to determine their preferred level, your slider will be displayed and used to set the value with real time feedback of the brightening/dimming of the screen. It is easier for the user to user rather than guessing a value. Of course it will be silently applied from the startup file.

figosdev wrote:i didnt know you could hide .desktop files from the menu and unhide them, thats cool.

This link might help become more familiar on this and other aspects of antiX.
post52231.html#p52231

Installed from DVD onto very old hardware to push the limits of antiX -- 1998 Toshiba Tecra 780dvd/cdm laptop (233MHz Pentium 2 CPU, 192MB RAM), here's what I happened for me (I'd love to see what other people are doing to get antiX on super-old comptuers):

- very slow boot ~169 seconds for initrd

- booted successfuly to standard GUI, so I tried to install from ICEWM desktop icon but it froze sometime shortly after 30%,

- tried to install again from min-jwm (because it uses a bit less RAM) but still froze.

- rebooted tried BitJam's idea of"fdb+ 3" and then used cli-installer (disabled bluetooth and cups services) and it took just under an hour (53mins) but it worked! I installed on an old 10GB HDD (4200rpm?) and did a 200MB swap file (since it has 192/180MB of RAM), next time I'll install on a 16gb mSATA, but to test the extreme I wanted to use the old hardware, and this HDD while old was actually newer than the comupter itself.

- when rebooted to GUI changed desktop to greyscale wallpaper, and did min-jwm desktop option --> ~46-53MB RAM out of 180MB showing up (out of the 192MB installed).

- used Control Center to start Synaptic and uninstalled FireFox since it is waaaaaay too RAM/CPU intensive for this old beast but uninstalling was glacially slow.

- tried changing the default application of the web browser (using the control center) to Dillo and Links2 but it wouldn't stick (i.e., it was blank when reopened it and there was no functioning default web-browser), maybe I should have done this before uninstalling FireFox, maybe removing it wrecked this, I dunno.

- like in my Thinkpad 600x test, the Sound Card (Yamaha 3D sound effect-enabled OPL3-SA3 = Sound Blaster 3.01) didn't work -- in fact it doesn't even show up in inxi ! Tried to test the sound using the Control Center, and same thing as with 600x a screen pops up very fast and can't see whatever error there might be.

- I modified the Grub files (as per eugen-b's advice in earlier posts) to boot in 3 for CLI option

- rebooted into cli . screensize was wrong (has 1024x768 screen) just showing as a centered smaller box in middle (maybe VGA 640x480?) it did this also when did the install from cli but I wrongly assumed it would be fixed after it installed, and it also shows this on the Grub screen too.

- I tried the antiX-cli-cc to fix this but when using the console-width-select got an error"is framebooter enabled", other options under that menu likewise failed to change the screen size or font color (which was different than in terminal from the GUI boot).

- RAM use under the cli boot was lower ranging from 33MB (env-info, htop, neofetch) to 40MB (screenfetch) to 44MB (inxi). This is good showing how little RAM antiX can run on (again the Tecra 780, while maxed out, still only has 192MB of RAM which antiX reports as 180MB)!

- To test installation under cli I installed ninvaders and it took a long 56.24 seconds. game played fine (well no sound as per above).

- Thinking about the sound I thought maybe it was a kernel issue not recognizing such an old sound system so I tried to install the Debian Fallback 32-bit Kernel. The cli-aptiX says"the 'kernels' feature isn't implemented yet" so I'll try that again under Beta2. I tried it under the GUI with min-jwm and it also froze (108/180MB RAM was last I saw in the conky).

- Ethernet worked automatically through DLink PCMCIA card!

- Overall, while it is possible to use a computer this old (again I'd love to compare notes with anyone else trying this on super-old computers) things are pretty slow and some applications are just too intensive to use at all (e.g., FireFox) or too slow to use comfortable (e.g., LibreOffice), using lighter application packages is better (Dillo, Links2, Leafpad, Geany, etc.), and CLI is better still (links2 -g, etc.). I'm a bit worried about how the CPU is often maxed out at 100%.

- If the Console Terminal screen size can be fixed to use the full 1024x768 display and the Sound system somehow enabled (it's actually quite good sound quality in DOS and Windows 98, I was just doing some retro-gaming) then this could be useful and cool mainly cli computer (I've found dozens of great cli apps in the antiX-cli-cc package manager and doing google searches, there is a bit of life with cli) with the option to do minor gui stuff. Hopefully when the cli-aptiX kernel feature is implemented the fallback kernel can handle the sound.

- Again, I offer this as a test for pushing the lower limits of what is possible (maybe not recommended) with antiX 17b1.

Thinkpad x60 Tablet still won't work with antiX17b1, still having the same graphic screen display problems as it did with the alpha test of not booting all the way (as per alpha feedback thread on these forums)

strangely, antiX 16.1 and 16.2, however, work both from Live DVD and HDD install (I'm posting this using antiX 16.2). So the problem isn't with the system itself but stems from whatever changed with antiX from 16 to 17.

I don't know if this will help fix this but here's the info I can find on it working in antiX 16.2.

Here's the inxi:
here's the OpenGL info (glxinfo| grep OpenGL): and here's the Graphics (ispci -vv | grep VGA -A 12): I'm not sure why the graphics aren't being detected and configured properly in antiX17 when they are in 16.

As per previously on Thinkpad 600x: sound not working I only get the too quick pop-up error when I do: Control Center -> Hardware -> Test Sound, so I can't test the Audio + Video stuff

But following BitJam's comment...

BitJam wrote: There is a bug in this early release of the antiX-cli-cc: it doesn't pause when it is supposed when run in a terminal window. We are working on fixing this. In the meantime, it should work correctly from inside a virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F2, etc). This won't fix the sound problem but it will let you see the error message if there is one.

Ok, so I tried this from the antiX-cli-cc instead of the gui cc (Control Center -> Hardware -> Test Sound), and got a result:

jason[at]thinkpad-600x-antiX-17b1:~
$ speaker-test again here's the info on the 600x Sound Card
$ inxi -Axxx Hopefully this helps diagnose why the sound isn't working. Is there any more info I can give that would be helpful?