Screen brightness control not working on Lenovo T530

Question

My brightness control doesn't work with a fresh install of 12.10 (brand new laptop). It is set to the brightest setting when I boot up and when I try to change it, I see the notification bar come up but the brightness doesn't actually change. I've tried all the solutions I could find around the Internet but none of them work. Things I have tried include:

Editing /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness

In /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-brightness-control.conf: Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

In /etc/default/grub: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"

There is no xorg.conf file in 12.10 that I have found, so the solutions that suggest editing that file don't do me a whole lot of good.

I am currently using the Nouveau driver, but switching to the Nvidia proprietary drivers made no difference.

Any other ideas? When is this bug going to be fixed? With all the reports I've come across I would think it would get a lot of attention. Thanks.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem on my thinkpad W530. I finally found a solution here:

http://blog.pearce.org.nz/2012/08/enabling-external-monitor-on-lenovo.html

These days X automatically configures itself, so you can't just edit the xorg.conf file, you instead need to add a section to a file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and X will include that section in the configuration that it automatically generates.

So to get the screen brightness keys working with your Nvidia graphics card, create a file in the xorg.conf.d directory, e.g:

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia-brightness.conf

Paste the following into the file:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro K1000M"
    Option         "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection

Answer 2

Did Ubuntu backported patches from Kernel 3.7 to 3.6? That could be the cause, see here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51231

Try to use the brightness slider vom "System Settings" > "Brightness & Lock" in GNOME.

Answer 3

Have you updated grub (sudo update grub) after you edit /etc/default/grub and rebooted?

If above not working Also try with acpi_backlight=vendor only.

If it is a thinkpad thinkpad-acpi.brightness_enable=1 parameter is also required.

You can check to see if your system uses the thinkpad-acpi driver by using the following command:

lsmod | grep thinkpad_acpi

Check this page (See first paragraph & Diagnostic Techniques)

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Update :

Another thing I just show, have you edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf file? in your question you are pointing to some other location which I never heard of. Execute nvidia-xconfig to generate config file, if /etc/X11/xorg.conf doesn't exist.

Secondly, try one solution at one time. if that doesn't work revert back and reboot then try other solution.

Another workaround could be

Try following for paths shown by ls /sys/class/backlight/*/brightness and replace accordingly.

example paths will be like

/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness

1. For the above path Get the maximum brightness:

cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness

Try a lower value to set the brightness, say output is 16 so I will try with half of it

echo 8 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness

If this works, make this happen in each login automatically by doing the following

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

Enter this line just before exit 0. It should look like

echo YOUR_VALUE_HERE > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
exit 0

Also you can try with xdotool

Answer 4

This is kind of a workaroun, but you can try setting the brightness via command line using:

xbacklight -set 100

If that works, trying binding a global keyboard shortcut to

xbacklight -inc 5

and

xbacklight -dec 5