New: Nvidia Brightness Control

[IntuitiveNipple]

A new Gnome panel applet to control Nvidia screen brightness:

Having recently bought a Sony Vaio laptop that has a Nvidia GeForce Go 7600, and installed Ubuntu Feisty, I found the existing brightness control (using sonypi interface) doesn't work.

I also tried the Gnome panel applet VaioLCD Brightness but it relies on the sonypi device too.

The smartdimmer package is the solution. It is a command-line program that can get, set, and increment/decrement brightness on many Nvidia chipsets.

I wanted a Gnome panel applet just like VaioLCD Brightness to make the task easy, so I have hacked VaioLCD into a new package, SmartDimmerApplet, that makes calls to the smartdimmer program to adjust brightness.

I've published the code and instructions on the Ubuntu Forums for anyone that wants to try it.

[Thunderbird]

I recommend to also add an Nvclock backend. It supports the same functionality (actually Smartdimmer is based on an old stripped version) and it is more compatible. (In the future there will also be nvclock support for hal or some other method)