Adjust screen brightness in Flux Box Edition

[bendavis]

Hi there, new to Manjaro (and Arch as it goes) however I've used Fedora and Debian for many years now. I have to say Manjaro is fast! And I am truly loving all the well crafted and varied "spins" available. I don't think my usb stick has ever taken such a battering. Anyway, I digress.

I just thought I would share a little snippet to add screen brightness keys to fluxbox. As a laptop user I find this is crucial for prolonging battery life.

The snippet is as follows and can be added to your keys file which can be found in /home/yourusername/.fluxbox folder.

Code: [Select]

# Adjust screen brightness
none XF86MonBrightnessDown :Exec xbacklight -dec 10%
none XF86MonBrightnessUp :Exec xbacklight -inc 10%
Note that the XF86MonBrightnessDown/Up refers to my laptops' brightness up and down keys. Yours may be different so run the xev command in a terminal to see what your buttons come up as. I think a lot of modern laptops use this but I've been wrong before...

Hope this is useful to someone 

[gohlip]

My old fluxbox works automatically for brightness buttons. It's a dell inspiron.
Anyway, welcome to Manjaro. I agree it's one of the best linux community (perhaps we try very hard to keep it that way, know what I mean?    ). Cheers.

[oberon]

Hi bendavis and welcome!
Thanks for your contribution.
On both my Acer laptops the brightness keys have been working fine with the preinstalled package cbatticon that delivers the tray-icon...
Obviously it's not working on every machine... I will see if I can include your keybinding without conflicts  - maybe I will just comment it out.
Or maybe I could even play with that cbatticon-app a bit ... let me see

[bendavis]

Wow two replies already - I do like this community!

Thanks for the info oberon, I don't have a brightness tray icon on my HP laptop for some reason. I have only been running it live so far - could that be the reason for its absence? That or my optimus setup? Now I know what I'm looking for, I'll read up on cbatticon and see if I can't figure it out.

Either way, thanks for the great spin. I'm very tempted to replace my fedora 22 install with this when I get a new sdd. It will fly!

Thanks for all your hard work and your welcomes 

[oberon]

So are you saying, you have launched the live ISO as it is and you get not battery icon?
That's weird! Please checksum your download!
Meanwhile I have dug a little into cbatticon source code and could not really find out where the keybinding is located.
Then I tried uninstalling cbatticon and my brightness keys still work  So obviously I was wrong with cbatticon being the provider of this functionality
Also I could not find any other package to be responsible.
Strange also about your solution: When I add a notification with it I do see them when I use my keys - and that tells me that the key identifiers are indeed the same ... 
So. This is a bit mysterious to me
Why not just stick with your addition to the keys-file if it works!?

[oberon]

I don't have a brightness tray icon on my HP laptop for some reason.

Ah sorry, now I understand I think.
Cbatticon is not a brightness-icon! It's just the battery icon.
I was simply suspecting it for supplying the brightness funcionality because in other environments xfce4-power-manager does the same.
This by the way would be another option for you: You could get rid of cbatticon and install

Code: [Select]

sudo pacman -S xfce4-power-manager and then autostart that one in ~/.fluxbox/startup instead.
But again: If it works with your keybindings, why bother...

[bendavis]

That makes sense about cbatticon. My sleepy morning brain didn't twig what it's likely job was - I certainly do have a battery icon!

Oberon, do you specify the vendor backlight in your grub boot command? Or perhaps in your ACPI settings? Keystrokes, specifically those that have a specific job (brightness, volume, WiFi toggle etc) I'm pretty sure are normally picked and controlled by X. Hence why your key identifiers are the same. The only reason I can think of that I need to bind my keys manually and you don't is because I'm not using the vendor prefix as I've only run live so far. Maybe... 

I'll have a poke around when I get home from work. Your spin has really intrigued me as I've always loved the speed and simplicity of fluxbox. I feel a blog post extolling its virtues coming on 

P.S why don't you have your own forum page yet? Because you should do!

[oberon]

Thank you, bendavis!
Good point about the vendor backlight settings. I used to have to set them specifically, but recently I realized that they appear to be taken care of by the nevest kernels automatically and it is working live, too...  - just maybe it's not working for your hardware plus live.
Keep us posted in any case!