Ubuntu – Brightness adjustment not working on Lenovo Y540

I had the same problem with my Vaio and Ubuntu.

I got it working with the nvidiabl-module and the oBacklight script.

The script is available from this repository, and these instructions may be helpful.

Or use the newer DKMS-based way described in the README file. If you use that technique, you really should read that file thoroughly. However, one method that should work is to download a .deb file and install it. The project is inactive so nvidiabl-dkms_0.87_all.deb will likely remain the latest .debpackage. You can download and install that package with these two commands:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/guillaumezin/nvidiabl/master/install/deb/nvidiabl-dkms_0.87_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i nvidiabl-dkms_0.87_all.deb

The README has information on other ways to install, as well as uninstalling.

I had a similar problem on my thinkpad W530. I finally found a solution here:

http://blog.pearce.org.nz/2012/08/enabling-external-monitor-on-lenovo.html

These days X automatically configures itself, so you can't just edit the xorg.conf file, you instead need to add a section to a file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and X will include that section in the configuration that it automatically generates.

So to get the screen brightness keys working with your Nvidia graphics card, create a file in the xorg.conf.d directory, e.g:

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia-brightness.conf

Paste the following into the file:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro K1000M"
    Option         "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection