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Asked: 2013-10-21 23:02:58 +0800 CST

Changing the brightness stopped working in 13.10 Saucy Salamander

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After the upgrade to 13.10 Saucy Salamander, the brightness controls stopped working. This worked fine from 12.04 throughout.

Does anyone have an idea how I can fix this? If not, can you point me at the right package to file a bug against?

Bug I filed so far:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/1241745

Solutions I have tried:

/etc/default/grub

Changed this line to several options:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" →

  1. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"
  2. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_backlight=vendor"
  3. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”acpi_osi="!Windows 2012"

sudo update-grub

None worked.

I also tried to use xbacklight, which didn't work either. xbacklight -get wouldn't return anything.

drivers

5 Answers

  1. the only way to change brightness is to use this command

    sudo su

echo 150 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

    all other solution does not work at the moment. this is not my work around. I don't remember where I found this but it works and hats off to the person who gave this workaround :)

    Using Ubuntu 13.10 64Bit Wubi on Lenovo Z570

    • 5

  2. If you're using intel video card do:

    sudo -H gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

    Add the following in the empty file then log out and log in again or reboot. That should fix your problem.

    Section "Device"
    Identifier  "card0"
    Driver      "intel"
    Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
    BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"

EndSection
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  3. Best Answer

    As Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton) brought to my attention on IRC, this is bug related to the latest drivers nvidia-319-updates. Reverting back to 304 fixed my problems, although I call this rather a workaround than a fix, as I won't get many of the recent performance improvements of newer drivers.

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  4. Possibly the NVidia and Intel are separate bugs as seen on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-319/+bug/1241745/comments/17. I filed a separate bug for Intel: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/1255428.

    For Intel, the solution given above does indeed work. An alternate is, you may just do in a terminal:

    echo 150 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

    i.e. avoiding the sudo su or whatever and merging the two steps into one.

    Note that this solution involves the problem of piping the output of a command to a file requiring su permission for writing to. See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/82256/how-do-i-use-sudo-to-redirect-output-to-a-location-i-dont-have-permission-to-wr and https://stackoverflow.com/a/20234210/1503120.

    I also wrote a simple PyQt4 GUI for this workaround. Please see the Intel LP bug for that.

    • 1

  5. As an interim workaround I use:

    xrandr --output LVDS1 --brightness 0.8

    To list output devices, execute "xrandr" without any flags.

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