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I installed Ubuntu 12.04 today on my Samsung RV509 Notebook (Nvidia Geforce 315M) and the backlight brightness controls don't work on it.

I did some digging around the web and found the samsung tools voria repository and installed Samsung-backlight package from there. This didn't help though.

I see that the Nvidia drivers are in use. Any help or pointers are appreciated.

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  • I just figured out that I can decrease brightness from the nvidia X server setting panel directly. Ubuntu is still unable to directly decrease the brightness from system settings though.
    – Nands
    Apr 28, 2012 at 18:56
  • Ok, I got a bit confused between brightness and backlight. The nvidia setting decreases the brightness of the images,vidoes ect, so they start looking dull and undefined. What I'm looking for reducing backlight intensity.
    – Nands
    Apr 29, 2012 at 14:41
  • possible duplicate: askubuntu.com/q/76081/43660 May 31, 2012 at 5:37

3 Answers 3

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You may try this:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Find this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

And change to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

Save and close the file. Then update grub:

sudo update-grub

Reboot and check.

This did the trick for me on a Samsung NP300 notebook. The brightness keys in the keyboard were not working before this. Hope this helps.

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  • 1
    Thanks. I made this change. Now when I unplug the power the backlight decreases automatically. Bad part, the hot keys (Fn keys) do not work anymore. I have not way left to change the backlight manually. I do not care much about the Fn keys but I want a way to change backlight manually whenever I want.
    – Nands
    Apr 30, 2012 at 10:22
  • Thanks @Tom , your trick works nicely for my Samsung RV509 with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, And I have no problem with Fn keys, I can control brightness with those keys. Oct 25, 2015 at 15:14
  • This answer saved me again, on the same Samsung RV509 (which is now 10+ years old) I installed Xubuntu 22.04 and faced the same problem. And this solution worked again, but this time Fn keys are not working. Dec 27, 2022 at 3:37
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Run:

gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Add

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

to the “Device” section so it looks somewhat like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier  "Default Device"
Option  "NoLogo"    "True"
Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection

Then restart the X server.

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  • You may want to edit your post to include information about how to restart the X server. Also, please note that, as discussed in comments to this question, backlight intensity and brightness are two different things. Jun 3, 2012 at 6:54
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I suggest that you use Ubuntu 11.10. And install all the available drivers from the Voria repo. Make sure you have nvidia_bl installed which is required to correctly manage brightness.

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