Radeon 7500 and DPMS

[Stefan Bruda]

At 23:46 -0400 on 2002-9-11 Ron McCall wrote:
 >
 > I tried doing the same with my Radeon 7500 card.  The DPMS option is
 > being recognized by the radeon driver according to my XFree86 log file
 > but when I do the "xset dpms force off" the screen doesn't go completely
 > black.  I don't know if it is the backlight or what.

It is probably the backlight.  Mine behaves in the same way, the
screen goes off but the apple on the lid remains lit.  Since the said
apple is dirrectly lit up by the backlight, the conclusion seems
obvious to me.

As for a solution, I use pbbuttonsd to manually set the backlight to 0
(by repeatedly pressing F1 in the default setting) when I go to bed or
something (I do keep my tibook on all the time except while I carry it
around between distant locations), which in conjunction to DPMS
appears to power off the whole thing.  You may want to try it (if
nobody comes up with a better idea that is), pbbuttonsd should work on
any machine with sleep abilities (and even without), not just
notebooks.

It might be of marginal interest to mention that my old iMac running
LinuxPPC 2000 Q4 has for some strange reason the off and suspend modes
reversed: if I say "xset dpms force off" it understands "xset dpms
force suspend" and the other way around.  I did not dig too deep into
the mnatter though, as I am using that machine only as a dialup server
and holder of my diary and alarms.  However, on my tibook no xset dpms
appears to shut down the backlight, no matter what (although
pdduttonsd does precisely this, without any fuss).

Stefan

-- 
If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as
it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
    --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass