Screen Brightness Issue

2 replies [Last post]
etk
etk
Offline
Joined: 03/29/2014

Hi,

I've been running Trisquel on my N-150 Samsung netbook for about a month now, and recently came into a bit of a problem regarding the brightness of my screen. As of two days ago my screen has been very dimly lit. None of the keyboard commands to adjust this are doing any good to fix the problem, and neither are the power savings features. In fact they have never worked with my computer model, yet I never considered it an issue because I have always been happy with my screen brightness until about 2 days ago, when my desktop froze, I was forced to restart my computer and rebooted it to find this very dull screen. I highly doubt there would be any quick remedies to this, and feel like it may be a problem with firmware. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas or has experienced this themselves please let me know.

Regards,

Eric

dadix
Offline
Joined: 07/01/2013

Edit the grub bootloader configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

change the line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

Again, type Control-X to exit, press the Y key and then press enter to save the file.

Update the grub bootloader configuration:

sudo update-grub2
sudo reboot

More informations here:
https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/brightness-trisquel-mini-lxde-samsung-users

alguien
Offline
Joined: 03/27/2014

OK so we can rule out the power saving features and backlight switch.

You might want to verify that it isn't a hardware issue. How old is your netbook? A bad backlight may cause a display to become dim.

Maybe try popping in a live DVD of Trisquel or some other distro. If it's a software issue and it was working before, then the problem shouldn't show up when you start up the live DVD (since it will be a fresh instance). In which case, you can troubleshoot whatever bug or other software issue it is. If the backlight still doesn't work, then I would assume that your backlight needs replacement and a trip to the repair shop will fix that.