Hi! I’m pretty new to linux having only dabbled a bit in the past with it since it has never run well on my computer. Recently I tried putting Kubuntu Natty Narwhal on yet again and to my surprise it mostly worked. The only major thing wrong with it was my brightness controls didn’t work (I have a VPCCW21FX laptop) at first this was an anoyance being blinded by my screen but I soon realized that it was killing my battery life. So having tried to seek help in getting it to work I tried out OpenSUSE. They worked! but as soon as I updated the kernal they no longer worked. No Problem. I reinstalled and told it to never apply that update. Then I installed the official nvidia drivers via repository on the opensuse wiki. they installed and worked but my brightness controls were once again broken. So this is my dilemma I need those drivers (gaming) but I would really like to keep my Brightness Controls thanks in advance for any help you provide!
You should be able to control brightness via the nvidia-settings (you can install it from Packman); go to “X Server color correction” and you’ll find various options to configure brightness, contrast etc. There’s also a subsection called “X Server Video Settings”, but it has no effect for me (not sure when it can / should be used). This tool offers some more interesting options, for example the “Digital Vibrance” settings.
I do have that, but as is indicated by the title “color correction” it corrects color brightness. It has no effect on backlight brightness. So changing it does nothing for my battery life and little for my eyes since its still pumping out the same amount of light just with darker colors. Thanks for trying though; any and all help is appreciated.
Have you tried using the xbacklight command in a terminal (normal user)? You can use xbacklight --help to see the command options. However, the settings probably won’t persist through a reboot/restart.
I'm maybe thinking that if I find the right nvidia driver version that properly corresponds with my kernal version maybe it'll work. But then again I'm a noob so if anyone else has a better idea I would be grateful for it.
I am a bit clueless here, but if I were you, I’d try the driver from the NVidia-site (do not forget to uninstall the repo-driver and disable the NVidia-repo before that).
I thought there was a reliable HowTo for that in this forum or in the Wiki, unfortunately I can not find them or they are incomplete. So here is a short step by step:
Download the driver, for example in /home/your_username
End the current desktop session so you’ll see the login-screen
Hit Ctrl + Alt + F1
Login as root (remember that you have to type your root-password “blind”, no feedback-stars or anything)
Switch to runlevel 3:
init 3
## Hit "Enter" to regain the bash-prompt
Run the NVidia-installer
sh /home/your_username/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-275.21.run -q
## the version number might be different!
When the driver was successfully installed, switch back to runlevel 5:
init 5
…and you should see your login screen again. The new driver is now up and working.
Good luck!
Edit - One small drawback of this method: you will have to reinstall the driver after each kernel-update (which does not happen very often, though).
Thanks for the guide. Unfortunately I already stumbled my way through that course of action last night. It didn’t work. Also, you have to install gcc, make, and the kernel source for the application to build the appropriate kernel module. Anyway, the default driver, the one that’s supposed to be an open source approach to nvidia cards works with brightness as long as I stay on the kernel from 11.4. If I update it doesn’t work. If I don’t update but install the nvidia blob then it also stops working. So, baring any breakthroughs on the subject I have made the surprisingly difficult choice to ditch brightness in favor of accelerated graphics, though any input would be more than welcome.
[ubuntu] Sony Vaio VPCCW1E1R Brightness control Ubuntu 9.10 - Ubuntu Forums](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1420341) I think this might work but I also suspect its a bit beyond my skill level to implement without screwing it up. If anyone could comment on whether they think it might work or not I’d be grateful. Thanks.
nV News Forums - View Single Post - Linux backlight driver Ok, I’m pretty sure this will do it but I don’t know how to follow the guide since it was written for ubuntu. Please help me with this, I feel like I’m really really close, I just need a little guidance.
Solved! If anyone reading needs the solution it is here Linux backlight driver - Page 5 - nV News Forums post 53 is a working guide it needs a little common sense correction for file names and you can skip editing the nvidia_bl.c file since ther isn’t one. Skip the kernel sysconfig file since it edits it for you, apparently and this command
“lsmod | grep nvidia_bl” did not appear to do anything. But in the end it works on my laptop and I’m as happy as a clam :).
