The nv driver doesn't seem to turn off the backlight on my Dell Inspiron 8600
either (running Fedora Core 3 and x.org 6.8.2-1)

Backlight also fails to turn off on the Dell Inspiron 8600

Any plan on merging this one or should the bug be closed?

Backlight doesn't go off on Dell Inspiron 8200 either with an nVidia GeForce2 
Go. I can however switch to a console and issue the command 'vbetool dpms off' 
which does turn off the backlight(and then blind-type 'vbetool dpms on' to turn 
it back on)

Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys.  Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.

I have a patch that can be used to turn off the backlight on a Dell Inspiron 8200, submitted to the xorg mailing list: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-September/028672.html

Aaron was waiting for feedback from the hardware guys, but it's been 3 months since. Any news?

Giuseppe, I submitted your patch on the 25th.  It's in xf86-video-nv-2.1.7.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-nv/commit/?id=e844f10c7b5e41330f2bcb884ab448641dd5bb06

Egbert, the patch attached to that XFree86 bug has the same system-specific limitations that Giuseppe's does.  I'd be open to having some sort of subvendor/subdevice quirks database, but definitely can't accept applying the patch to all GeForce4 4200 Gos.  Reassigning to reporter and setting NEEDINFO to get the PCI subvendor and subdevice IDs.