I am experiencing this issue as well. I discovered that the Power Manager Brightness Applet "Cannot get laptop panel brightness," even though notify-osd correctly displays the brightness when I manually adjust it (using my laptop's acpi hotkeys). So I am wondering if Gnome Power Manager is attempting to get the current brightness from the same place as Power Manager Brightness Applet, and when it fails, it sets the un-idle brightness to the hard-coded value of 50% (from /apps/gnome- power-manager/backlight/brightness_dim_battery).
Unfortunately it's very difficult to test this, because the idle dimming is not triggered every time after 10 seconds (gconf setting) as I would expect. I'm not sure what is going on here. It does seem almost random when it is triggered. For some inexplicable reason, they have removed the setting from G-P-M preferences to control what you want your brightness set to when idle. The gconf setting is not absolute, but rather a percentage of the full brightness setting--this I just think is counter-intuitive. In any case, Some of the problem may also have to do with rounding errors. My computer has 8 brightness levels: 12 24 36 48 60 72 84 100. I have brightness_ac set to 100. Then using the acpi hotkeys, I turn the brightness down 1 level to 84. I unplug my AC cable, and it drops to 48 (42 is halfway between 36 and 48 so it rounds up I guess?). Then, when I plug the cable back in, it gets reset to 72! I cannot explain this at all. It repeats this same pattern for every brightness level below 100, but if it is initially at 100 when I unplug it, it gets restored to 100 just fine. I'm not sure all of this is applicable to this bug, it seems like there are several things all going wrong at once here. And I imagine it's machine-specific as well, leading to quite a wonderful mess! -- "dim display when idle" only dims but doesn't restore the previous value when not idle anymore https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/392122 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
