Ambient light level sensor in Fedora 8???

[Sam Varshavchik]

I thought that I was going nuts at first, but I confirmed this after some 
experimentation: after upgrading one of my laptops to Fedora 8, the LCD 
backlight seems to autoadjust itself according to the ambient light level in 
the room. This did not happen in Fedora 7.

I left the laptop running, then came back a few minutes later with the 
lights off in the room, and the laptop's screen was about half at its usual 
brightness. I thought that it was some screensaver at first, but it wasn't. 
Uh-oh, is my backlight busted? I turned on the lights in the room, so I 
could see better, and immediately the LCD went up to its full brightness 
level. I turned the lights off, and a few seconds later the display dimmed 
to about a 50% level. WTF?

This is a no-name brand laptop. I have a small widget directly above the 
screen that is labeled with a small etched picture of a microphone. That's, 
apparently, my laptop's built-in microphone, which I never used. I 
discovered that if I cover up the entire microphone sensor, that triggers 
the backlight to dim to half power. Looks like I have an ambient light 
sensor in there. News to me -- the laptop's ~2 years old, and I never knew 
about it until now. It apparently didn't do anything in F7, neither does the 
dual-booted Win XP pay any attention to the came, but in F8 it came alive 
and made its presence known.

Does anyone know anything about this, and, specifically, if there's anything 
in F8 Gnome that lets me tweak this sensor's settings? I don't see anything 
going to /var/log/messages when I play with the sensor. A brief search 
didn't find anything. I don't see anything in the Gnome power management 
menu, except the usual global backlight levels for AC Power and Battery 
modes, and I can trigger this sensor both on AC Power, and battery power, 
apparently.



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