Hi.
I have an eeepc, and it comes with acpi software for adjusting the screen brightness. However in a dark room, the screen is still far too bright on its lowest setting.
Some beta software named eeectl already exists with the intent of allowing users to control brightness among other things, but just makes my screen go black, not what it should do.

I was wondering whether it'd either be possible to identify and debug the app that sets this lower limit, by just increasing the limit. Alternatively to write a simple app to do this in C.

I'm seeking opinions on good tutorials to read/whereabouts in the acpi spec to start/if I'm in over my head.
I consider myself a newbie who's mostly good at trial and error.

If I press Fn+F3 or F4, it adjusts the brightness up or down. So I was thinking that if I learn how to break on these specific keycodes, I might eventually end up at code that does what I want.
It's kind of hackity, but I have time and a passion to learn using less than elegant methods.

Thanks in advance.

The dev site for eeectl seems to be down, but I found a copy elsewhere. Taking a quick look it seems that you can set that lower threshold in the ini file

Backlight.Profiles = Lowest,10; Low,30; Medium,50; Bright,70; Ultra bright,100;

I'd go for that solution first. If that doesn't work, you could probably fix it to suit, but it's a packed file with an embedded driver. From what I read the exe source is GPL and you can download it (if the site was up), the driver source remains closed. Recompiling the exe source might fix your problem, but the ini file still seems to be a considerate configuration option if it works.

You could also trying lowering the gamma setting in the default display properties of the PC, which will darken up the screen.

Thanks for the reply. Which version do you have? I only managed to find an older version, and wonder if perhaps that's the reason it won't work.
People have been linking to the developers site up until last month, so I think 0.2.3 is the latest?
The archive I found doesn't contain the source either, but thanks for the information regarding packing/embedded driver.

Here's the 0.2.4 version someone had uploaded. Since this is semi open source and may not even be being developed any longer, I don't really see a problem discussing it.

Since this is an unknown file (someone from the eeectl forums had uploaded it to a file sharing site), and didn't come directly from the developer's site - treat it with the caution any unknown file requires.

Thank you very much!
With some irony, the minimum brightness my screen will go to is 11 in the ini, with 10 being the default. After that it just goes black.
11 is much darker than the default software allows though, so this is exactly what I need.
I really appreciate your help.
Thanks.