[PATCH][RFC] Backlight addon for dell laptops

[Erik Andrén]

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Hi.

I've developed an addon for hal, making it possible to control the AC
and the battery backlight values for Dell laptops using SMBIOS.

My first approach was to try to emulate the work the c++ libsmbios
library developed by Dell did in C. I quickly discovered  that the code
got quite messy and thus I decided to abandon this approach in favor of
linking against the libsmbios library. This of course meant that I
needed to write the addon in c++. (I don't know if there is a policy in
the hal development against having c++-programs shipped).
Anyway, I got away with this implementation rather cheaply, only needing
to introduce a slight modification to logger.h in hald/

The addon currently works quite well for me but I still have the
following issues:

1. There seems to be something funky going on in gnome-power-manager
while changing the brightness in battery mode. It thinks the current
level is 7 all the time. This bug is problably related to the
gnome-power-manager as the Power Manager Brightness Applet works correctly.

2. Brightness turnaround speed isn't great. It's definitely an
improvement when
compared with the patch developed by Richard Hughes in July but when
going from 7 (highest) to 0 (lowest) you can definitely feel the lag.

3. No support for if you have protected you bios with a password. It's
quite possible to workaround this issue by adding some kind of a
mechanism throwing an exception prompting for the password. This
problably need to be coordinated with gnome-power-manager.

The attached patch cleanly applies to current git.

Please comment.

/With kind regards
Erik Andrén

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