[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#528991: hal fails to use dcdbas to set brightness on dell laptop

[david b.]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.11-8
Severity: important

My laptop a dell latitude d400, can hang/ and or hal takes up all my cpu.
To repoduce this bug, 
1. turn on the dim screen option in gnome power power settings.
2. Then use the laptop for a minute.
3. leave it alone for 30seconds to 1 minute
4. find that the laptop takes around 5-7 seconds to respond to keyboard / mouse movements.

A workaround is disabling the 'dim' screen option in gnome power management.
This problem as documented on the ubuntu list(see below), can crash the system.



The exact error that hal reports (when running in verbose mode, not as a daemon)  is "addon-dell-backlight.cpp:214: Received Setbirghtness Dbus call" + "addon-dell-backlight.cpp:116: Could not access the dcdbas kernel module. Please make sure it is loaded. "

(perhaps this is a dbus bug ?).


Note: (i have a bios password set)

references:
http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com/msg905584.html
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7221


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.1
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (1001, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages hal depends on:
ii  adduser           3.110                  add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus              1.2.1-5                simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  hal-info          20080508+git20080601-1 Hardware Abstraction Layer - fdi f
ii  libc6             2.7-18                 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3       1.2.1-5                simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2  0.76-1                 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libexpat1         2.0.1-4                XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libgcc1           1:4.3.2-1.1            GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0      2.16.6-1+lenny1        The GLib library of C routines
ii  libhal-storage1   0.5.11-8               Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libhal1           0.5.11-8               Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libsmbios2        2.0.3.dfsg-1           Provide access to (SM)BIOS informa
ii  libstdc++6        4.3.2-1.1              The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libusb-0.1-4      2:0.1.12-13            userspace USB programming library
ii  libvolume-id0     0.125-7+lenny1         libvolume_id shared library
ii  lsb-base          3.2-20                 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  mount             2.13.1.1-1             Tools for mounting and manipulatin
ii  pciutils          1:3.0.0-6              Linux PCI Utilities
ii  pm-utils          1.1.2.4-1              utilities and scripts for power ma
ii  udev              0.125-7+lenny1         /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  usbutils          0.73-10                Linux USB utilities

Versions of packages hal recommends:
ii  eject                       2.1.5+deb1-4 ejects CDs and operates CD-Changer
pn  libsmbios-bin               <none>       (no description available)

Versions of packages hal suggests:
ii  gnome-device-manager          0.2-2      GNOME device manager based on HAL

-- no debconf information