No control over screen brightness on Ubuntu-Mate 16.04

Question

I'm running Ubuntu MATE on a samsung N210 netbook, which is rather old. I had it running Ubuntu 14.04, till yesterday, and the screen brightness control worked fine since day one.

After installing Ubuntu-MATE (from the the ubuntu-mate iso) the screen brightness is permanently at 100%, the fn combo works, and the overlay shows the brightness level being altered, but no actual change occurs. The same thing happens when altering from Power Management.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Open /etc/default/grub with:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Modify the line reading GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

so it says

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=native"

Then run:

sudo update-grub