Posts Tagged ‘video card’

How to increase brightness on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo PI22515 notebook with Slackware Linux

Friday, March 9th, 2012

Increase LCD screen brightness on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop with Linux Slackware

A friend of mine has Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop and is full time using his computer with Slackware Linux.

He is quite happy with Slackware Linux 13.37 on the laptop, but unfortunately sometimes his screen brightness lowers. One example when the screen gets darkened is when he switch the computer on without being plugged in the electricity grid. This lowered brightness makes the screen un-user friendly and is quite tiring for the eye …

By default the laptop has the usual function keys and in theory pressing Function (fn) + F8 / F7 – should increase / decrease the brightness with no problems, however on Slackware Linux (and probably on other Linuxes too?), the function keys are not properly recognized and not responding whilst pressed.
I used to have brigtness issues on my Lenovo notebook too and remember how irritating this was.
After a bit of recalling memories on how I solved this brightness issues I remembered the screen brigthness on Linux is tunable through /proc virtual (memory) filesystem.

The laptop (Amilo) Fujitsu Siemens video card is:

lspci |grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 03)

I took a quick look in /proc and found few files called brightness:
 

  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD01/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD03/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD05/brightness

cat-ting /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD01/brightness, /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD03/brightness, /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness all shows not supported and therefore, they cannot be used to modify brightness:

bash-4.1# for i in $(/proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD0{1,3,4,5}/brightness); do \
cat $i;
done
<not supported>
<not supported>
<not supported>
<not supported>

After a bit of testing I finally succeeded in increasing the brightness.
Increasing the brightness on the notebook Intel GM965 video card model is done, through file:

/proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness

To see all the brightness levels the Fujitsu LCD display supports:

bash-4.1# cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness
levels: 13 25 38 50 63 75 88 100
current: 25

As you can see the dark screen was caused cause the current: brightness is set to a low value of 25.
To light up the LCD screen and make the screen display fine again, I increased the brightness to the maximum level 100, e.g.:

bash-4.1# echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness

Just for the fun, I've written also a two lines script which gradually increases LCDs brightness 🙂

bash-4.1# echo '13' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness;
bash-4.1# for i in \
$(cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness|grep 'levels'|sed -e 's#levels:##g'); do \
echo $i > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness; sleep 1; \done

fujitsu_siemens_brightness_fun.sh script is fun to observe in changing the LCD screen gradually in one second intervals 🙂

Here is also a tiny program that reduces and increases the notebook laptop brightness written in C. My friend Dido, coded it in just few minutes just for the fun 🙂
To permanently solve the issues with darkened screen on boot time it is a good idea to include echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness in /etc/rc.local:

bash-4.1# echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness

I've also written another Universal Linux Increase laptop screen brightness Shell script which should be presumable also working for all Laptop models running Linux 🙂

My maximize_all_linux_laptops_brightness.sh "universal increase Linux brightness" script is here
I'll be glad to hear from people who had tested the script on other laptops and can confirm it works fine for them.
 

The day wasn’t so bad at all

Monday, February 5th, 2007

Yesterday I was on a birthday of a one girl Krisi she is 18 already. It was a standard teen party. Awful place, I drunk 3 beers and smoked a lot of cigaretes in general we discussed with some ppl Does the Lord exist things. Is evolution real is it possible at all things like this. There was one boy who was keen on Free Software GPL etc. I realized I’m a real psycho after I started to convince him Windows and M$ products are much better than free software :]. After 3 hours speaking like a 15 years m$ user. When walking back for home. I asked my self what the heck? What I did I’m real psycho ;]. Zuio and I broke 1 flowerpot when doing POGO on a Hipodil song. I eat some strange salad with hands ( I pretended to be a Bangla person ) :]. Nomen drunk a lot and got angry at a guy and proposed to start a fight:]. In 5:30 a.m. we were already at home. Our mood got fucked up a little when going back to home. In the morning Papi wake me up and suggested to go to a coffee, I aggreed as usual but I did misunderstood about the place where we decided to see, and waited on other place after that I realized I did a mistake and he meant we have to see each other in the Winter Theather not the Summer One (silly me). After that normal day I eat. I did some server descriptions, played mame in Nomen (I went his home). I was able to start gxmame to work in fullscreen in the end (my integrated video card is doing alot of problems about the games) but I found out the xmame -ef 1 option. That one rules.END—–

How to install display and audio drivers on motherboard Asus P5B-Plus with video ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT on Windows XP

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Ati Radeon 2600 XT, Display and Audio Drivers download how to

I re-installed one PC with Windows XP which was refusing to boot. The PC had a hardware of:

Motherboard: Asus P5B-Plus
Video Adapter: ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
Sound card / Sound Blaster:

Ethernet card: Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Controller

It took me like 1 hour of search on the Internet and looking through forum threads and sites to properly install all the hardware. In hope to help someone out there looking to install the hardware Window drivers on ATI RAdeon HD 2600 XT, I’ve made a small archive of all the drivers necessery to make the Video card , Sound Card and Ethernet be properly installed and operating.

Here is download link to all the drivers for ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT to run smoothly on Windows XP

Installation of the drivers on Windows is pretty straight forward download the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT archive extract and install each one of the files contained in the archive. A few restarts will also be necessery after some of the installed drivers to make the drivers work.

ATI Catalyst (included in the archive) will install the Video drivers for the Radeon XT 2600, whether AD1988AB_Audio_V6585_XpVistaWin7 and 11-11_xp32-64_hdmiaudio will install the Audio drivers. Attansic_L1_Lan_V1737907_V10560011159 contained in the archive needs to be extracted and installed to make the Attensic L1 Gigabit ethernet to show up as installed hardware in Windows device manager.

Hope this post will save some time to ppl looking to install the same drivers on XP 😉
Cheers 😉

How to install Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 on Ubuntu 11.04

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

Nvidia Tux GeForce GNU / Linux

Yesterday I was at a friend of mine who has recently installed Ubuntu 11.04 to his already oldish Desktop computer.

The system was 1.4Ghz (amd) with 512 RAM and some kind of Dell Trinitron 19 inch monitor
Even though he tried hard to make his NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 ‘s drive to work properly with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, he just has messed it even more.
As I always like helping people and I’m joyful for people who want to migrate to Linux, I took some time to make his NVIDIA GeForce work with this Ubuntu release.

First I tried to make it work by using some of the official NVIDIA Linux drivers located on nvidia.com following some online tutorial for Ubuntu claiming that it works but actually it didn’t, so finally after a bit of experimentation I found a way to make this video card work.
Here is how:

1. Install the following Ubuntu packages

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install nouveau-firmware nvidia-173 nvidia-173-kernel-source
nvidia-cg-toolkit nvidia-common nvidia-current nvidia-glx-173 nvidia-settings
...

2. Load in the kernel and set to be auto loaded on boot nvidia’s driver kernel module nvidia-173

root@ubuntu:~# depmod -a;
root@ubutnu:~# modprobe nvidia-173
root@ubuntu:~# echo nvidia-173 >> /etc/modules

3. Stop temporary (Gnome dipsplay manager) gdm

root@ubuntu:~# service gdm stop
...

4. Use nvidia-xconfig to generate a working version of /etc/X11/xorg.conf for Nvidia

root@ubuntu:~# nvidia-xconfig
..

nvidia-xconfig will generate new /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration corresponding to the Nvidia GeForce Fx 5500 and will move the old xorg.conf to xorg.conf.backup.

5. Start the gdm manager to be running again

root@ubuntu:~# service gdm start
...

Now the Xserver will start in a terrible mode of 640×480, probably because Ubuntu was unable to define correct VerticalSync and HorizontalSync for the 19 inch Dell Trinitron monitor or for some other weird reason, to fix this it’s quite easy though.
The fix to the NVIDIA GeForce 5500 running in 640×480 mode is done straigh via Gnome menus.

6. Use Gnome’s System -> Preferences -> Monitors to set raise up the Xserver resolution

Navigate to Gnome’s menus:

System -> Preferences -> Monitors

Gnome System Preferences Monitors Nvidia GeForce 5500 Ubuntu

Here you will have to select more appropriate resolution and a different refresh rate, which in my case was 1024×768 and further on to store the settings press the Apply button.

One oddity here was that according to the Monitor Preferences the refresh rate was running on 54 Hz which I don’t believe was the case as I guess it’s some kind of Gnome or Ubuntu bug. I changed the 54 Hz Refresh Rate to 50 Hz as using the 54 Hz refresh rate as the screen had a minor vibrations observable if one takes a thorough look on the screen.

Setting the NVIDIA GeForce 5500 driver to work with 50 Hz Refresh Rate in Gnome loooked like the Windows’s 85 Hz RR and looked quite nice so I left it this way.

Finally to test the newly installed driver 3D acceleration I used glxgears.

7. Install glxgears in order to be able to test that 3D acceleration on Nvidia works fine

root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install mesa-utils

After installing mesa-utils which nowdays contains glxgears executable one needs to execute the glxgears binary.

root@ubuntu:~# glxgears

Immediately after a window containing the glxgears should popup on the screen, like shown in below screenshot
Benchmark 3d Acceleration Linu glxgears

glxgears showed 3d acceleration works fine as the performance for 3d rendering shown was quite good and therefore 3D acceleration was running fine.

And that was it now the video works like and my friends, can enjoy the fun to have a generally virus Free OS 😉