Ubuntu – Cannot change brightness on the laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E535)

12.10brightnesslenovo

I recently installed Ubuntu 12.10 on my laptop but I am frustrated by not being able to increase or decrease the screen brightness by using neither the keyboard controls nor the brightness slider in the "Brightness & Lock" settings. It is weird because I was able to do it on Ubuntu 12.04 but not 12.10. Any help??

Best Answer

I have the keys working. I had to download the latest drivers (testing not stable) from the AMD website. I found the problem in the Catalyst center when I didn't see the discrete graphics card.

I installed using the --buildpkg switch when I ran the drivers. The problem isn't the screen it is the video card driver.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Macbook Pro 5.5 brightness settings work, are remembered, but are not used on startup

have you tried to set up manually in xrandr? Just try this one: to set brightness as 0.8 type this command in ~/.xprofile (make this file if it is not available yet)

xrandr --output LVDS1 --brightness 0.8

The code above is to set the main monitor (LVDS1) brightness to be 0.8. Just change it depend on your needs. Then, restart your mac and let see..

Ubuntu – I cannot change the screen brightness

What worked for me was to change the /etc/default/grub file as follows:

Open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and type sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
Find the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" and modify it to one of the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

or

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor" (try this if the first one doesn't work)
Save and close gedit.
Then type sudo update-grub
Reboot your pc.

EDIT

As from Ubuntu 13.10, this did not solve the problem for me on a Toshiba laptop. I needed one extra step for the problem to be solved.

I had to create an xorg.conf file in /etc/X11/ with the following contents:

Section "Device"
       Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
       Driver          "intel"
       Option          "Backlight"       "intel_backlight"
EndSection
#
Section "Monitor"
       Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
#
Section "Screen"
       Identifier      "Default Screen"
       Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
       Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

WARNING!! Getting the file wrong or if this configuration is not compatible with your hardware, might end up with an unbootable system! It happened to me.

In that case, you'll have to delete (or rename) the file, but to do so requires either booting from a liveUSB or liveDVD (the simplest way) or booting in recovery mode, making the Ubuntu partition rewritable and then delete the offending xorg.conf file.

EDIT2

Starting with kernel 4.4, the toshiba backlight device is blacklisted and doesn't appear any longer thus rendering these workarounds redundant.