Hey everybody,

just coming here to report a little success. Due to its manpage, vald
only supports the Toshiba Libretto:
  "The vald driver has only been tested on the Libretto L3."

Well, you can add "and on the Portege 3440."

All of the four keys work; F8 toggles the fan, F6/F7 the LCD brightness
and F5 switches LCD/CRT/both. In the manpage of the vald it says:

  "BUGS vald has a problem with X11 when switching between
   LCD and External Video output."

At least for the P3440 this is not true. Switching between LCD/CRT/both
will just work fine (tm) on this machine, even with X running.

The only thing is a minor nuisance with Fn+F6/F7, when the backlight
is out it takes too many Fn+F7s to turn it back on again but a
VALD_ACPI_DEBUG will tell me more I hope.

 (
  toshiba p3440 ct / 4.99.48, :
  vald0 at acpi0 (VALD, TOS6200): Toshiba VALD
  vald0: AC adaptor connected
  vald0: LCD backlight on
  vald0: get LCD brightness via _BCL
  _BCL retrun: 7 packages
 )

Regards,

-Martin