🦇 Happy Halloween! 🦇

In order to celebrate, I thought it would be appropriate to write about something spooky 👻! So, as far as I remember, when I first installed Debian on my Lenovo T470p everything was OK, all the buttons were behaving just as expected, but, after a hibernation, the screen backlight buttons where not working anymore 😱. Even more frightening, since that time, I am not able to change the intensity of the screen backlight from GNOME control center and since recently I have the same issue for the keyboard backlight 😱.

So far, I have never found a way to fix this but I found a workaround by looking on how to fix this issue. Basically, the intensity of the screen backlight and the keyboard backlight are given by numbers stored in files named brightness found folders in /sys/class/ that correspond to the two device (bscreen acklight and keyboard backlight). So I have created two aliases in my .zprofile to modify the values in these files:

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alias mysbl='sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness <<<'
alias mykbl='sudo tee /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::kbd_backlight/brightness <<<'

To understand the lines above you must know what tee is and what are here-strings (for the latter I found this answer pretty useful). So now, let’s say I want to change my backlight to medium intensity, if so I would open my terminal and then type:

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$ mysbl 800

That’s it! I wish this will be fixed soon, I guess I have to reinstall something… If I found a solution or if a future update fixes this, I’ll write another note, in the meanwhile I’ll keep using theses aliases!