I recently switched my uniwill 245II0 laptop from Ubuntu to Debian Sarge with the 2.6.8 kernel. Upon doing so my backlight stopped comimg on after a lid event. See previous thread for everything I tried (from vbetool and vbe_post to different kernels and acpi scripts).
I finally made a little progress by installing the 2.4.27 kernel. Looking at the .config file I found that it disabled ACPI by default. Without ACPI the lid button caused the system to go into some type of suspend. I'd prefer the flexibility of acpi but am willing to forgoe it for the time being. Problem is removing acpi from the kernel (either 2.4.27 which has it off by default or 2.6.8 by passing acpi=off) causes me to loose my synaptics mouse and atheros card functionality. The mouse seems to work fine with gpm but I haven't been able to get it to function in X even with trying various input devices and protocols. I've also tried turning off gpm before starting X. When using the synaptics driver X complains about the evdev modules being missing (atleast with the 2.4 kernel). The madwifi drivers load and iwconfig sees the interface but it doesn't get any signal. There is a switch that turns off the radio and a led that normally reflects the state of the switch. Without ACPI that led remains off regardless of the switch state and it would appear that the radio does remain off. I know this e-mail is not quite a good example of ESR's smart questions, but this problem is driving me up the wall. I'm beginning to have a hard time approaching it rationally. I'd just install ubuntu again if I thought it would help. However, the live cd produces the same behavior as debian does with acpi enabled. ANY suggestions greatly appreciated. I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a hardware problem instead of a software configuration issue. Thanks in advance. --Dave
