Hey everyone,

I'd like to introduce EBD - the Enhanced Backlight Daemon.

It monitors the N900's light sensor, and adjusts the backlight according to ambient light conditions.. a feature I was surprised to find missing on release... and again with each update.

EDIT: As others have posted, the feature does exist! Mine just wasn't working. In any case, I'll continue to improve this daemon as more customizable alternative. If nothing else, at least it's GPL, replacing the functionality in MCE.

The daemon itself is written in C and is optimized to reduce its footprint; it draws less than 1MB ram (DBUS aware), and only wakes up when the screen is on.

At the moment, there is no configuration, but I'll add that in the days/weeks to come. Note that it will fight with other LCD brightness events, so if you have a backlight control panel present, it won't work properly while EBD is running. I hope to fix this in a future release.

This is my first official package, so bear with me. I've attached the .deb, until I get set up on the Maemo repositories. It works fine for me, but remember to backup your device before installing anything from outside the stable tree!

To install it, just run (as root):

The help sheet:

Just a note - if you kill the process (/etc/init.d/ebd stop), you can relaunch it in the foreground as root. In verbose mode, it tells you a bit about what's going on.

Comments/feedback appreciated!