Display brightness adjustment not working

Question

I have Ubuntu 11.04 installed on a Lenovo Thinkpad T410 laptop with nVidia GT218 display controller. I am unable to adjust the display brightness. Pressing Fn-Home and Fn-End brings up the display brightness on-screen display and the indicated level increases or decreases as it should. But the actual display brightness does not change.

Earlier I was able to Ctrl-Alt-F1 over to a text terminal and then do Fn-Home / Fn-End to successfully change the display brightness, and then Ctrl-Alt-F8 back to the Gnome session with the new brightness. But after upgrading to 11.04 the psuedoterminals have disappeared.

Solution

I have Thinkpad W510 and followed the instruction in this page. It solved the problem that you describe and Fn+Home/End are now toggling the brightness of the screen. I hope it will work for you too.

Comments

[nibot]

Unfortunately, this didn't work.

[nibot]

Ah, it did work! It needed a reboot and not just restarting the X server. In case that link goes away, the solution is to add a line saying Option “RegistryDwords” “EnableBrightnessControl=1″ to the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

[Shervin Asgari]

This change in the xorg.conf made it work for me!