Alas poor shiny-book

[lovingboth]

It looks like the backlight on the screen of my netbook has failed. Poo.

It was working over the weekend, but now won't illuminate. Poo.

It's a much loved Eee 901, and I have never seen anything really better: it was light, very portable size, with a very good battery life, yet powerful enough and with a good enough keyboard to do real stuff on. I had it at a meeting some years ago, not long after the iPhone came out, and the iPhone owner at it was jealous. Poo.

I do have a backup - an Eee 900 that was very cheap on Boffer, but it is slower, the keyboard is nowhere near as good, and the battery life is much worse. Poo.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

You'd think netbooks were built as absolutely cheaply as possible or something ...

(two Mini 9s here that died of crap build)

[barakta]

I don't like my Eee901 cos the keyboard's horrid. It is black and I could send you the full specs when I get home.

Do you want to make me an offer for it? ;)

[lovingboth]

I think it is sorted. Thanks to the wonders of Google* it turns out that - as usual - someone else has had a problem too.

The first suggested cure, he says noting this all down for future reference, was changing /etc/default/grub/ 's GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line to be

"quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"

(i.e. changing how the power settings work the backlight) then doing

sudo update-grub

and rebooting. That didn't work, but I have kept it in anyway.

The second suggested cure came after discovering that doing cat /sys/class/backlight/eeepc/brightness produces the output of..

0

.. i.e. off.

The neat trick of

sudo chmod 666 /sys/class/backlight/eeepc/brightness

means you can write to it via the command line without being root and:

echo 15 >/sys/class/backlight/eeepc/brightness

puts it to full brightness. (The value of 15 comes from the Eee 900's one.) Yay, I can see it again! It has been turned off and restarted, and it still works :) While I remember, I will make that a shortcut and a script..

I would swap a very, very little used Eee 900 for it though... :)

* <sub>I don't think JA will ever appreciate how life-changing access to something like it is. Fortunately she knows how to use a library, if she ever has to find something out off line.

I suspect she will come to appreciate how easy having a decent OS makes some of this. I have no idea how you would do some of this in Windows, apart from praying that an unmaintained driver you can't get the source to keeps working...</sub>