Screen brightness work around (part 2)

As mentioned before I am having some issues with my laptop’s hardware and controlling the screen brightness. Previously my work around was to set acpi_backlight=vender in the grub command line options. While this resulted in having full screen brightness it also removed my ability to use my keyboard function keys to adjust the screen brightness on the fly (not so good when you’re on battery). Removing this option allowed me to manually adjusted my screen brightness again but once again always started the laptop at zero brightness. What to do?

While far from a perfect solution my current work around is to use xdotool to simulate key presses on login which raise the screen brightness for me automatically. Here is the script that I run on startup:

#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..20}
do
     xdotool key XF86MonBrightnessUp
done

While this works great it still isn’t perfect. Because xdotool requires an X session it means I cannot run it before one is created. If you were unaware the login screen, in my case MDM, does not run inside of X (it actually starts X when you successfully login). So while this will automatically brighten my screen it won’t do so until I type in my username and password, leaving me to type into a fully dark screen or manually adjust the brightness up enough to see what I’m doing. Hopefully I’ll have a better solution sooner rather than later…