Wake Up on an Acer Aspire 7750 Works Again After Kernel Upgrade In Fedora

Since installing Fedora 18 on my Acer Aspire 7750 (I ran Ubtuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin on it before) I've had a couple of display problems.  Well, backlight problems to be more specific…

When I first threw Fedora 18 on this rig, I had trouble right away with the brightness.  Using the keyboard method (Fn and left arrow) to dim the screen shows a dimmer meter, but the screen doesn't get any dimmer.  To work around this, I run a command as root that dims it to what I'm used to.  I ended up creating a one liner script in /root called dimmer that I run when first booting the laptop:

#!/bin/bash
echo "100" > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

Most of the time, the laptop is just sleeping; upon waking, is as dim as I left it.  This is more laborious than I'd like, but I just haven't sat down long enough to figure out how to make the keyboard work yet.

I was on the 3.7.9-201 kernel for a while, and operating like this.  Then I upgraded to the 3.8.1-201 kernel, and found that upon waking my laptop's backlight wouldn't come back on.  I'd have to Ctrl + Alt + F2 to get to a terminal (still blind — it wasn't just GNOME that was dark) log in as root, and run ./dimmer.  I ended up leaving that terminal open, so that when I woke the laptop up I could just get into it and run ./dimmer real quick.  But that's not real secure…  I ended up booting back to the 3.7 kernel all the time.

This past weekend though, I got  NEW KERNEL!  3.8.2-206 came along, and the laptop is no longer in the drunken stupor when it wakes up.