Backlight bug on Acer Aspire 7720
Hi all,
I am not sure who this should be addressed to, so here it is. I have checked all the bugs I could find online and I don't think this one is documented yet. I am experiencing a seemingly random backlight problem with my installation (squeeze, constantly updated on an ACER Aspire 7720 laptop with two SATA hard drives; the original vista on the first 160 Gb drive and linux on the second identical 160 Gb drive with grub2 fully installed). I have no brightness control using the keyboard (fn+left/right arrows) and no OSD. Most of the other hotkeys seem to work; fn+f4 for sleep, volume is controllable (more or less) with the side wheel and mute fn+f8, wireless button, etc. If I put the computer to sleep then wake it up it (usually?) comes back with very reduced backlight brightness. When the problem appears, I get either very low backlighting or no backlighting at all. Once it has happened, it won't even turn on during bios boot. It can be restored by removing the battery, by booting into vista, which is done blindly, or... by installing ubuntu live 9.10 cd. when I insert the cd and reboot the computer, the backlight does not come on until the X server starts. I am thinking there is a bios bug, since even the acer splash screen is dark, but apparently the ubuntu team has found a workaround that restores whatever has been changed in persistent memory. I would be glad to send all data from my system that can help. I am fairly well versed in linux and am comfortable using the command line. This is a very annoying bug that completely disables the computer until one of the above resets is accomplished. Please let me know what I can do to help resolve this issue.
thanks in advance,
tom mccullough
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