All, I've use a shell script for backlight control on my laptop for years, but finally got around writing a little Qt3 app for kde3 to do the same. It's just a slider and spinbox that automatically reads the current brightness and max_brightness values from /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/ and then sets the limits for the slider and spinbox. When you mousewheel over the dialog, the brightness is changed up/down. https://paste.opensuse.org/pastes/f6a583fb9a69 If interested I'm happy to post the source. It needs more work (I'm going to make the parent mainwindow the systray so it can work like kmix, allowing mouseweel over the icon without having to launch it -- but that comes later) If your video/monitor supports acpi_video0 and it's present on your system (or you add "acpi_backlight=video" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= in /etc/default/grub, you can control any monitor that supports backlight change) I'm currently using it with a Nvdia card on a HP laptop. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.