Armada Backlight Controller

The Armada Backlight Controller is a program for controlling the brightness of the LCD backlight on Compaq Armada laptops under Linux. It has been tested on an Armada M700 running Red Hat Linux 7.2. It is based on code by George Acher, which was written for the M300 and has been used on the E500. This package should also work on those machines, although that has not been tested by Nat Pryce, who put this modified package together.

The package is divided into two parts:

1. A command-line program that is installed with privileges that allow it to control the backlight hardware (aka an "suid" program).
2. A GNOME panel applet that provides a convenient GUI to the command-line program.

An alternative way of using the command-line program is to configure your X window manager to run it in response to key sequences such as Alt-F10 to make the screen brighter and Alt-Shift-F10 to make the screen dimmer. (The F10 key has a brightness icon on it, which makes it appropriate for this function.)

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

GNOME Panel Applet

The Armada Backlight Controller applet is installed into the Utility category of the GNOME Applets menu.

When added to the panel, the applet presents a scrollbar that can be used to interactively control the brightness of the backlight and also shows the current level numerically. The icon identifies the applet in the panel and can be used to access the applet menu using the right mouse button.

Command Line Controller

Usage:

armada-backlight [+|-|value|--help]

Options: