today i got sick of my macbook backlight brightness controls not working in dapper and set out to do something about it. while sitting in ghazi’s with my good friend wolfgang, i set out to find and reverse engineer the apple kernel extension responsible for controlling the backlight brightness.
the result is that i have written an application to control the backlight on the macbook in linux.
the ubuntu dapper on the apple macbook page has been updated accordingly.
Y’know, there are dozens of these little single-use apps for controlling one specific laptop’s brightness, or multimedia keys, or webcam, or Some Other Widget lying around the web. It occurs to me there should be some kind of central point for finding all these things, to make it easier for users and distro makers…
Ryan, you are ridiculously awesome.
AdamW: There’s a whole /sys hookup for doing it in kernelspace, so that’s probably the right place. I know Matthew Garrett (mjg59) has been hacking on that API, so maybe worth giving him a mail..
Excellent work!
Maybe you could get the Macbook’s sleep to work, on your coffee break? :-)