[XFCE] Laptop Brightness OSD?

Question

A couple days ago, I was checking to see if brightness adjustment worked [it hadn't for the longest time, but I figured I'd try anyway since my laptop was almost out of battery] and it didn't at the time. However there was a bubble in the middle of the screen showing the supposed brightness level.
I've since figured out how to get my backlight working, but I can't get that OSD to appear again. From what I've been able to search up, it seems to be part of xfce4-power-manager.
I'm wondering: Does anyone know how to get this working reliably or know of a lightweight alternative to it?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Actually, I have working brightness keys (acpid + acpi_osi=Linux kernel bootline got this working), but I was looking for the actual notify bubble. It happened like twice, and it seems that XFCE's power manager is responsible for this, but there isn't any setting or documentation on this.
Your reply prompted me to make a little script that sits in the background and makes notify bubbles for brightness, since this has been a nagging issue every time I have to go mobile.
Here's a little script that shows notify bubbles if you change the brightness, the only issue is that (with xfce4-notifyd at least) the bubbles don't replace each other, so I set the expire time a little low and set the delay time a little higher so you don't end up filling your screen with bubbles.
The only non-standard dependency is bc, since bash can't do floating point math.
#!/bin/bash
# Put the full path to your backlight's sys folder here.
backclass=/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0
# How long to wait between brightness checks? (Seconds)
delay=2
while true; do
# Get the current backlight number
read current<"${backclass}/actual_brightness"
# Check for changes
if [ "$current" != "$last" ]; then
# If there ARE changes, it's ok to run the rest.
read max <"${backclass}/max_brightness"
percent=$(printf "%s\n" "scale = 2; ${current}/${max}" | bc | tr -d '.')
# Spit the notification out on whatever notify daemon we're using
notify-send "Brightness" -i xfpm-brightness-lcd -h int:value:${percent} -h string:synchronous:volume -t 4000
fi
# Create a "Last" Value for the next check
last=$current
# Wait this long before running the check again
sleep $delay
done
Last edited by DarkSniper (2012-03-03 19:49:12)