11.10 Screen Brightness resets to lowest setting when I restart laptop

[Warstub]

Every time I restart/reboot laptop, the brightness resets itself to the lowest setting. Really annoying.

I am a beginner Linux user. Please let me know if I have posted in wrong forum, and what further steps I should take if this problem is solvable.

Thanks.

[xyzzyman]

Is it an nvidia video card? If so the nvidia binary driver doesn't save the brightness setting like it does to what you're probably used to in Windows. As far as I've read there isn't a solution for this but I may be wrong. I have to adjust via fn keys on boot myself.

[Warstub]

Graphics tab in System Info doesn't say.

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite, L640, intel core i5

[Warstub]

okay, thanks.

[xyzzyman]

Running the command

lspci | grep VGA

Should show you what card you have.

And for future reference L640 is just your series of notebook. They shipped with both AMD and Intel CPU's depending on the model, and on Intel's sometimes laptops come with intel video cards and sometimes with nvidia, so always quote the full model for example Satellite L640-S1000. No worries, it's quite common. The actual model # is printed on the bottom of the laptop on the same sticker as the serial #.

[Pro$pect]

this is what worked for me:

edit the file /etc/rc.local

add this before line exit 0:

echo 5 > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness

Where 5 is the brightness level from 0 to 10

The max brightness is defined in /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness. The default is 15 on my laptop. So if you want to set it to 50%, you should use echo 7

[xyzzyman]

Worked here. Thank you! Oddly my max was 9!

[Warstub]

this is what worked for me:

ok, so I found the rc.local file, but I can't change it because I don't have permission. Can you please take me through the steps to do so.

Also, should there be gaps between any of the characters in "echo 5 > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness"?

I tried to insert "lspci ... grep VGA" into terminal but I don't know what that line inbetween represents.

Sorry, as I said, I'm new to Ubuntu, and don't actaully know all that much about computer language anyway.

I appreciate your help though.

[partloer]

I don't know if you are interested but I use a program called Redshift. This changes the color temperature of your screen based on the position of the sun and your location. During twilight and early morning, the color temperature transitions smoothly from night to daytime temperature to allow your eyes to slowly adapt.

http://jonls.dk/redshift/

[Rgibbons]

Worked on HP Mini also. Thanks