10/8/2005

ATI Radeon cards in Laptops

Cardoe wrote this terribly early in the morning:

Anyone have an ATI Radeon card in your laptop? Notice how when you shut the screen it really doesn’t turn off the screen. I never noticed this until just recently and after being an Nvidia card user for so long I find this kind of annoying. So here’s a quick fix for everyone.

Make sure your kernel has ACPI support and ACPI button support.

cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state

It should report as being opened. (duh!)

If you don’t have this then check your kernel config

grep 'CONFIG_ACPI_BUTTON' /usr/src/linux/.config

If this says it’s not enabled, then hop back into your kernel and find ACPI and turn it on.

Next make sure you have acpid turned on.

/etc/init.d/acpid status

If it doesn’t report as being on then flick it on.

rc-update add acpid default
/etc/init.d/acpid start

If you don’t have it then just emerge it. Also you will need the laptop-mode-tools ACPI events script.

emerge acpid laptop-mode-tools

And turn it on.

Now we’re going to need the tool to do the heavy lifting for us.

emerge radeontool

And finally edit the following file /etc/acpi/actions/lm_lid.sh and add

[[ $(</proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state) == *open ]] && \
/usr/bin/radeontool light on || \
/usr/bin/radeontool light off

And you should be set. Try closing your screen, you should notice the backlight go out.

For those of you that don’t use the external video output, it’s rumored that the following saves a little battery life.

radeontool dac off

* Filed under: General, Linux, Modular X

5 Responses to “ATI Radeon cards in Laptops”

  1. Andy Dustman Says:
    October 8th, 2005 at 11:14 am

    It’s actually not all laptop Radeons. On my old (3 yr) Compaq Presario 2700 with an R100, the lid switch has always worked to turn off the backlight. On my somewhat newer Dell D600 (R250 chipset?), it does need radeontool plus an ACPI script. It may not be the fault of the Radeon, but just bad ACPI implementation.

  2. benjamin Says:
    October 9th, 2005 at 2:57 am

    great fix !

    about the rumor tho.. dac off actually seems to take about ten minutes off a full charge

    inspiron 8600 with radeon 9600

  3. jake buchholz Says:
    October 14th, 2005 at 12:51 am

    nifty, ‘cept for one thing… i don’t appear to have a /etc/acpi/actions/lm_lid.sh file… what version of acpid are you using (i’ve got 1.0.4-r2), or is there another package i should be emerging to get the scripts?

  4. Cardoe Says:
    October 15th, 2005 at 2:38 am

    Oops. app-laptop/laptop-mode-tools provides “lm_lid.sh”

  5. zzcoke.com Says:
    November 10th, 2005 at 2:33 pm

    Thanks for the extra info

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