Acer Aspire 5749 screen brightness

[qutorial]

Hello, everyone!
Just became a member of community, installing Ubuntu 11.10 on my laptop Acer Aspire 5749 instead of MeeGo.
Currently I have one issue: brightness buttons. When I press them, the indicator shows up and progress-bar-like widget shows the changes in brightness. But the brightness itself stays the same and does not change.
Please, help!
Computer is like this:
https://www.amazon.de/Acer-Aspire-5749-2334G50Mikk-Notebook-Intel/dp/B005IES4K6/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319883073&sr=8-1-spell
Newly installed Ubuntu

[timvanderwart]

Hi everyone!

Like qutorial I have exactly the same issue. I have an 14inch Acer Aspire TimelineX 4830TG - 2434G, i5 intel core etc. running on 11.10. (dual boot with Windows7)

Almost everything works out of the box except for the brightness of the screen! My guess is that this is one of the main reasons why my laptop can be active for only 4 hours on it's battery: it should do 8 (if I believe what Acer promises that is...)

I tried fixing it by switching the graphics to integrated in BIOS but to no avail. Also I tried installing powertop but this froze the system in such a way that I had to reinstall Ubuntu completely!

Is there anyone who knows how to fix this, or anyone who knows how I could otherwise improve the battery life?

Tim (Netherlands)

[timvanderwart]

And on another note: is there a way to make the Acer power-manager button work under 11.10?

[qutorial]

The video card is Intel HD 3000. I found an advice to create and change xorg.conf file to contain this:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Default Device”
Option “NoLogo” “True”
Option “RegistryDwords” “EnableBrightnessControl=1″
EndSection

But the version of Ubuntu is different, plus it, they say, may lead to weird results.
Help needed

[timvanderwart]

I tried this also but it made my whole system freeze up. I had to reinstall everything.

I found out that in GRUB I can change the brightness, just not when Ubuntu runs...

[qutorial]

this forum looks like dead

[qutorial]

Still need an idea.

[T0NYisME]

hi guys, I too had some brightness issues and found this command helped 'xgamma -gamma .75' without quotes. Try adjusting the .75 with .95 as the max and .20 as the minimum, find what works best then add the command to the startup menu. Hope this helps

[Toz]

Open a terminal and run the following command:

lspci | grep VGA

You should get a reply something like:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ......

Note the numeric device number (in this case, 01:00.0)

Now try in the terminal window:

sudo setpci -s <device> F4.B=<value>

...where <device> is the device number from the previous step and <value> is a hexidecimal value between 00 and FF.

Examples:

sudo setpci -s 01:00.0 F4.B=00
sudo setpci -s 01:00.0 F4.B=7f
sudo setpci -s 01:00.0 F4.B=ff

Does this change the brightness?

[qutorial]

No, this does not change the brightness.