As my Toshiba Tecra S1 is not yet supported by the Linux kernel, I contacted Toshiba to get information about developing a driver to support all the nice features of the Tecra S1. After receiving the documentation and a little bit of reverse engineering of the windows driver I got all the information I needed. As a first step I have written the small program s1bl (S1 Brightness Level) to get/set the LCD brightness of my notebook as this was the feature I missed most. I hope that others will find the program useful. As a next step I plan to put the functionality into a linux kernel driver. Thanks to Toshiba for providing the information.
Shea Sanderson shea at sasktel dot net has just letting me know that the programm is also working on a Toshiba M40.
Matteo Zandi matteo dot zandi at gmail dot com has just letting me know that the programm is also working on a Toshiba M40-281.
Andreas Zoglauer azoglauer at web dot de has just letting me know that the programm is also working on a Toshiba Satellite M45 S331.
Alexander Otterbein a dot otterbein at gmx dot de has just letting me know that the programm is also working on a Toshiba Tecra A4.
Ahmed Kamal email dot ahmedkamal at googlemail dot com has just letting me know that the programm is also working on a Toshiba Satellite A105 (S361).
Current Version
s1bl-0.1.1.tar.gz
Older Version
s1bl.tar.gz
> tar xvzf s1bl.tar.gz > cd s1bl > gcc -o s1bl s1bl.c
As s1bl has to write to the extended BIOS the program has to be run with root privileges.
To read out the LCD bightness level use
# ./s1bl -g brightness level: 4To set the LCD brightness level use "
s1bl -s level" where "level" can
be a value between 0 and 7.
The darkest level is 0, 7 is the brightest.
# ./s1bl -s 6 brightness level: 6
Linux Information Website from Toshiba
linux.toshiba-dme.co.jp/linux/
Alex Roman has created a kernel module.
toshibasmi.woolnet.net
If you have any questions or problems with the tool you can send me an email to t dot zachmann at zagge dot de.