Hello! I used to be on LQ relatively frequently but took a long hiatus and lost both my login and email so I just got a new one. :P

I am having two small issues using Debian on my older PowerBook G4 (Al 15" 1.5GHz A1095), both started happening after I added i2c-dev to /etc/modules, and both stop happening if I remove the module again. I would like to keep the module added because I would like the backlight keyboard to work. I am not running any x server and would like this to stay console-only.

The first is that after startup is completed, and right before the login prompt is displayed, the screen switches to minimum brightness. This ordinarily wouldn't be too much of an issue but on this computer the whole display is turned off when on minimum brightness. I have tried fixing this by adding "echo 200 > /sys/class/backlight/radeon_l0/brightness" which works when run manually, to /etc/rc.local.

The second is that the screen turns off too fast when on battery power. I ordered a new battery an it can hold a charge for 5+ hours so I don't think that this could be a battery drain. I also used rc.local to try to fix this by adding "setterm --blank 0" to it but this did not work nor does this work when run manually.

My searching makes me think that there is a power save setting somewhere that is dictating this stuff. I don't know what to do with this info though, and I'm having a hard time finding information on controlling this stuff with systemd instead of init. The systemd-backlight service appears to be working because on rebook during startup the screen brightness does match what it was during shutdown, its not until right before the login prompt comes up that the brightness is lowered again. Any ideas?

Just to comment...

The G4 is a very power-hungry processor, and the G5 was impossible to use in laptops. This is the main reason Apple switched to Intel processors.

I'm sure they used very specialized software and/or hardware tricks to get even the G4 laptops to work decently with Mac OS which is probably missing from any type of Linux distribution.

You're post got me thinking, and I found the answer! I was trying to solve this too Linux-y. On Apple computers Debian installs a package called pbbuttonsd, which handles the hotkeys unique to Apple. This package also handles things like screen blanking and brightness. In /etc/pbbuttonsd.conf there were two options, "LCD_Brightness" and "onBattery_DimTime," that were exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!

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