I got a new laptop. More on that later, perhaps.

This laptop doesn’t have hardware controls for the screen brightness, it’s done via software. In linux, this is done via poking at stuff in /sys.

So to make my life easier, I wrote a little Python script to do it in a sane way. I do a similar thing for the keyboard backlight, but that only has 3 levels of brightness, so the math is much easier.

backlight.py

So I’m working with Fedora 17 lately, which uses systemd. I really want to like it, there’s a lot of good things here, especially the ability to auto- restart dead services, which I had been using daemontools for.

The issue is, systemd doesn’t quite seem ready for production use, despite being adopted by various Linux distributions.

I just spent some time this morning trying to work out why some NFS mounts configured in /etc/fstab would mount, but others wouldn’t. It appears to be a timing issue, for some unknown reason, systemd doesn’t load the nfs module before trying to mount NFS shares.

Solution:

echo 'nfs' >
/usr/lib/modules-load.d/nfs.conf

At least that’s easy.