Unable to change Brightness Ubuntu 13.04 Toshiba Satellite A105

Question

I have a Toshiba Satellite A105 s4384 running Ubuntu 13.04 and for some reason I cannot change the brightness.

Neither the function keys (Fn + F6/Fn + F7) nor the settings work, and it is really bothersome, as I would like to occasionally decrease the brightness (long car trips where my battery doesn't last, etc.)

Does anyone have any idea? Judging by the suggested questions this seems to be a rather prevalent issue, but none seem to have an answer! I had a similar problem with 12.04 LTS before I upgraded.

Answer 1

Well, after quite a while BYEAskUbuntu's answer solved it for me as per his answer here: How to change LCD brightness from command line (or via script)? (scroll down to his answer.)

I ran xrandr -q | grep " connected" and then xrandr --output LVDS1 --brightness [VALUE] and it worked!

Thanks to BYEAskUbuntu!

Answer 2

Each time I log on I have to enter "System Settings" then "Brightness and Lock" and drag the slider over to the right. However, this setting resets upon reboot/shutdown.

If you need something more permanent, try this way, copied from another post by Garry Cairns:

Open a terminal using Ctrl+Alt+t and type sudo apt-get install xbacklight. That will install xbacklight if it isn't already there (I can't remember whether it's a default package!).

Then type xbacklight -set x replacing the x with a number between 1 and 99 to set the percentage brightness for your screen backlight. You can actually set to 0 (and I do because I hate bright screens) but I understand that can cause problems on some displays so I don't recommend trying it.