Ubuntu – Can’t change brightness at all

brightness

Here is what it looks like when I go to the "change brightness" option. I am booting in recovery mode because when I boot to normal Ubuntu mode there is nothing you can see on the screen, I can only hear the login sound.

So I thought I would need to change the brightness but neither Fn + F6 works, nor do I get an option to change the brightness in the settings.

Screenshot

Best Answer

Manual way

Works for some systems, though not yours, apparently, since ls /sys/class/backlight/ shows nothing for you. Sometimes instead of intel_backlight you'll have acpi_video0, or something else.

You can manually change the brighntess level all the way down (to disable it altogether) by doing echo 23 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness as a root. "23" is the desired brightness level. If you put "0", the screen will look blank.

From Adam Ryczkowski's comment here, which helped my friend in similar case.

Empty /sys/class/backlight/ means unrecognized hardware

When I noticed your exchange with @Serg, I thought "why would that folder be empty" and search showed this:

If /sys/class/backlight/ is empty, that means that the kernel thinks you have a big bad old CRT attached to the system and that you have to turn the big fat knobs named "Brightness" and "Contrast" on the from to change... well, brightness and contrast...

source: @Fabby's answer to another AskUbuntu question.

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