How to control display brightness on Intel hardware?

Question

I'm working with a Sony Vaio BZ-12 Notebook and want to know how to manage the brightness of my display, especially when it's in eco-mode.

The designated Graphic-Accelerator is the Intel GM45. With the 10.04 release I could control the brightness with the Fn keys, but not all the time.

Answer 1

As ændrük said, this is probably not actually related to the intel driver, but if you want to adjust the backlight manually, you can set it via the command line using sysfs.

cat /sys/class/backlight/[whatever driver, usually there is only 1 just just tab complete this]/max_brightness

To see what the max is, then

echo [whatever brightness] | sudo tee - /sys/class/backlight/[same driver]/brightness

Answer 2

The easiest method is intel_backlight.

My laptop has Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics in my i3 2350m CPU in a Toshiba Satellite.

For very dim use $ sudo intel_backlight 1 and $ sudo intel_backlight 100 for full brightness.

Also, the lowest I can go with the normal ACPI, is 9% brightness according to intel_backlight, so going to 1% brightness is much brighter than the normal "lowest" backlight.

Answer 3

Install xgamma and its a breeze, you can set gamma with command xgamma -gamma xx where xx is your value.