I decided to turn my old laptop (mac intel powerbook) into a play server using OpenBSD, mostly for their security reputation. Previous unix experience was Slackware a long long time ago.
I want to have it turn its screen off when I’m not using it. Should be simple. Apparently display.brightness is the setting to use… but that doesn’t show up in wsconsctl with the other display.* settings that are available. display.screen_off does appear, but doesn’t seem to do anything even if I set the timeout absurdly low.
I’ve tracked down that on apple computers, the abl (apple backlight) driver is what enables that control. My dmesg tells me that abl is there:
acpi0 at bios0: ACPI 4.0 abl0 at acpi0: PLNF (backlight)
but I haven’t managed to figure out yet how to get that display.brightness control to show up! All the instructions I’ve found assume it’s already there, which has been frustrating.
Anyhow, if anyone knows their OpenBSD-on-mac stuff, I’d appreciate any pointers to solve this. I don’t really want to leave the screen on 24/7 when I do finally have it acting as a server.
(Possibly relevant for suggesting things or tools to try: I have not installed any X11/gui stuff; I’m working purely on the terminal. Please tell me I don’t need the X11 libraries to turn off my backlight.)