Screen Brightness with Mint 17.2 Cinnamon

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
,
1

How's it going guys. Last night I made the move over to Linux on my Acer Aspire 5334, and began my one year Linux challenge. I installed Mint 17.2 Cinnamon. I can find the brightness settings no problem it's just that the slider does nothing, whether I move it right or left the screen stays on max brightness. Same thing if I use the Fn key and the arrows or the F5/F6. I googled trying to find a fix, but the solutions I find are for different and older versions of Linux.

Can anyone offer any help? It might sound like a minor issue but it kills the battery FAST, and when using the laptop at night it's killer on the eyeballs.

Thanks for your time

2

You can install xbacklight:

sudo apt-get install xbacklight

You can either use xbacklight from the console, here is the manual page (http://linux.die.net/man/1/xbacklight) or you can rebind your brightness keys to

  • brightness up key: xbacklight -inc 10 increase the backlight by 10%
  • brightness down key: xbacklight -dec 10 decrease the backlight by 10%
3

@Spidernet Thanks. So I just run that command to install xbacklight and that's it?

4

http://linux.die.net/man/1/xbacklight

5

you install xbacklight and use xbacklight -inc 10 to increase the backlight by 10%, or whatever percent you want and xbacklight -dec 10 to decrease the backlight by 10% or whatever you want.
In my previous post I linked you the man page of xbacklight.

6

When I run the command to install xbacklight it asks me for my password which is fine but the keyboard does not type anything?

7

it does.
thats a linux thing, type your password and press enter

8

It's typing the password, you just don't see it for security reasons.

9

Thanks guys sorry VERY new to Linus just installed this last night then went to bed.

10

No problem. Did that fix your issue?

11

Gonna see now

12

Negative ran the command to install it, entered my password and it did its thing. Then entered the inc and dec commands separately rebooted and still the same

13

Do you notice any brightness decrease if you type xbacklight -set 40 ? You don't need to reboot.

14

Nope

15

What video card do you have? Intel?

16

No clue on this laptop let me check and see

Yes Intel:

Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics controller

17

Ok, then. On a terminal window type

ls /sys/class/backlight/

The output should include intel_backlight

if it does type this command sudo touch /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf it will create a config file for your graphic card. Now we need to edit it, by using this command:

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

It will open a text editor, paste inside the file these lines:

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

save the file, exit the editor, reboot and try again with xbacklight or with the slider.

2 Likes
18

@spidernet Thank you VERY much! It worked. Can adjust the brightness now with ease. Much appreciated.

3 Likes
19

if that^above doesn't work paste these in your terminal and post the outputs

xbacklight -10

-

lspci -nn | grep VGA

-

xrandr
20

never mind. lol.

yay fixed.

welcome to linux!