I have a Dell XPS 13 Laptop (old series) with ArchLinux and Gnome 3.18.
I've read in official gnome 3.18 release notes that
If a light sensor is present, GNOME will now automatically adjust the
display brightness in order to adjust for the ambient light level.Can be tested using a ColorHugALS device for those who don't have
built in hardware.Windows 8 compatible hardware is supported.
A switch in the control center's power panel allows automatic display
brightness to be turned on/off.
My ambient light sensor is not supported by Linux kernel out of the box, however I have compiled and installed / loaded this module and now my sensor appears as /sys/bus/acpi/devices/ACPI0008:00/
. For example I can do
$ cat /sys/bus/acpi/devices/ACPI0008:00/iio\:device0/in_illuminance_raw
153
and read current raw illuminance.
However this seems not to be detected / supported by gnome as I still don't get a "switch in the control center's power panel" and display brightness is not automatically adjusted.
How can I make it work?
Best Answer
In the end I managed to get it working thanks to the support of one of the
iio-sensor-proxy
and kernel developers.In my case I had to pull
iio-sensor-proxy
from git and apply this patch:Compiled and installed as per README instruction and finally enabled
iio-sensor-proxy.service
Now I have automatic brightness adjustment working.Finally, the dev has submitted a patch to linux kernel that in future will enable
iio-sensor-proxy
working out of the box also on computers having similar ALS without requiring to patchiio-sensor-proxy
.