Include fixes in *buntu

[Seth Forshee]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 02:44:40PM +0200, Martin Beltov wrote:
> Hello, dear developers of Ubuntu! I want to ask something, that I think is
> relevant to the Ubuntu:
> I have a small samsung netbook that requires a custom kernel module to be
> installed from a ppa (https://launchpad.net/~voria/+archive/ppa) so that *fn
> * keys work for backlight brightness adjustment. My question is: can this
> kernel module and script be installed in the main kernel, so that this
> annoyance can be avoided? From what I read this is an issue that has
> plagued samsung laptop owners for several years now. The installed *
> samsung-tools* and *samsung-backlight*  fixes this issue.
> I am willing to help if I can, I just want to have a truly out-of-the-box
> experience with Gnu/Linux. This problem is present in all distros (that's
> what I read from the Internet, I have only tried it on *buntu).
> Thank you in advance.

The samsung-laptop module distributed in the ppa actually seems to be
based on a driver already in upstream Linux and distributed with Ubuntu.
They have diverged quite a bit, but at a glance the upstream version
looks more complete, not less. The upstream driver also includes
backlight support that looks similar to that in samsung-backlight.

I have no idea about samsung-tools. Does it work around stuff that's
broken in the drivers somehow, or does it just contain some utilities
for convenience? One possibility is that the backlight control in
upstream samsung-laptop really does work but the kernel is also exposing
a broken acpi_video backlight interface with is getting used instead
(this is actually a fairly common situation), and that samsung-tools is
working around this situation.

I can walk you though the debugging to start figuring this out, but
that's probably better done in the context of a bug in Launchpad than a
mailing list discussion here. Feel free to file a bug and subscribe me
to it (or subscribe me to an existing bug if you've already filed one).
But if there really are fixes applicable to samsung-laptop in the PPA
then those changes need to make their way upstream.

Seth