Do any distros work the eMachines e525 backlight properly
 

I have an eMachines e525 laptop; it used to work brilliantly up to Fedora14. Since Fedora15, through to the latest Fedora18, I can only use it if I install a crontab that does this:

every minute. It there a better distro or a better workround?

I have an eMachines e725-4520. I had to add that command to rc.M to unblank the screen at startup and unblank the screen after it blanked automatically (I wrote a script called unblank: easier to get right when typing with a blank screen) 2 years ago then I had to patch the kernel to keep the screen from blanking permanently when I started X. I think the programmers fixed the first problem eventually; I still have a patched kernel (latest, 3.7.7) for the latter problem.