Ubuntu – Brightness control Issue Samsung RV520 in Ubuntu 12.04

I have a MacBook Pro 7,1 (Mid2010) and have installed the "nvidia-current" drivers.

For me worked the following method:

Type in Terminal:

user@MacBookPro:~$ sudo nvidia-xconfig

I have done that, because the "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file was missing. After that command it should have been created.

Then open the file:

user@MacBookPro:~$ sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Add in the 'Section "Device"' following line:

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

After that the Section should look like this:

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

Then after a restart the brightness controls worked perfectly fine for me.

Hope this helped you.

After a day of investigation, it turns out this problem is apparently just as rampant (see open&product=&content=backlight">http://ati.cchtml.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=open&product=&content=backlight) as intermittent resume freeze after suspend when using fglrx module (as opposed to the proprietary driver). For the time being any driver above 9.012 doesn't have backlight support working. As of June 2013, the only workaround (see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1269560#p1269560) for drivers newer than 9.012 is to press hardware brightness buttons and hold them for several seconds. This will usually cycle between brightest and darkest setting (depending on which button you're holding) which should be ok enough to use the laptop in a way that allows some battery life optimization/autonomy when away from AC but it is also an ugly hack. I guess we will have to wait until AMD releases next version (13.6 beta is also affected) of the driver and hopefully fixes the regression.

For the time being, I will not pick this as my answer in hope someone may come up with a better solution.