How do I get brightness working on a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga?

Question

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga. It's been working flawlessly with Windows 8 - 9 hour battery life, awesome touchscreen, 4-second boot times.

So obviously I wanted to try Ubuntu 12.10. Well, I downloaded it and installed it - but I couldn't change the brightness!

These hotkeys work in Windows but not in Ubuntu - and none of the solutions others have proposed in other similar questions with Lenovo laptops have worked.

How can I make my brightness hotkeys work?

Solution 1

FOR 12.10

Okay, I found an answer in this page.

This solved my brightness problems permanently:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

You will find this line in the new opened window:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Change it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

Save and close the window and type this in the terminal:

sudo update-grub

and reboot.

FOR 13.04

1. Add the acpi_backlight=vendor to your grub default command line
2. Run the update-grub command
3. blacklist the ideapad_laptop by adding "blacklist ideapad_laptop" to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file.
4. Reboot

Solution 2

I have another solution:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_osi=\"!Windows 2012\""

and

sudo update-grub

fixed it for me.

Comments

[Admin]

Please tell us which solutions did you try.

[Admin]

I found an answer! It shall be posted in 6 hours, as new users can't post answers for 8 hours after the questions's been asked.

[Torinouq]

I had precisely this problem on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon under Ubuntu 13.04 and the solution solved it.

[Owen Versteeg]

Huh, I'll try this when I update to 13.04. Thanks!

[Matthew Walton]

This worked well for me on my ThinkPad T430, and fits in with the bug discussion on the kernel change which caused it.

[krlmlr]

Now, on my T430 in Ubuntu 13.04, brightness gets adjusted properly but the brightness level indicator doesn't show the correct value. Anyway...

[ojdo]

The FOR 13.04 steps also helped me with making the touchpad of my Yoga 11s work directly after boot, not only after a standy-resume detour under Ubuntu 15.10.