Display brightness on Macbook Pro 5,4 …

[Linux Mind]

… under Linux Mint Nadia.

Hello out there, I am a complete Newbie to Linux and this forum, too, so first I wanna greet all of you - you have been really helpful to me in the last days when I fiddled around with my double-boot Linux installation on my 2009 Macbook Pro.

Nearly everything works fine right now, despite that dammed issue with display brightness which seemingly many of you already know quite well - I have been reading a lot ! Using F1 and F2, I can easily adjust the control on the screen - but display brightness itself does not change at all. Only when I flip down the display (susppend), wait a few seconds and then reopen the lid again will the display have the new brightness setting.

This effect came up when I changed to the NVIDIA 304.64 (stable) which I had to do, because I needed dual display support (before, the system used "Gallium something" as a driver) to my Geforce 9400 M card. Since then I am fiddling around with bkms and pommed and whatsoever I could find in the forums - with no change at all. Has anybody fixed that ? How ?

As well, coming from Mac OS, I am used to dragging objects around on the desktop from A to B in several steps with the touchpad. Now, everytime I draw my finger away from the pad (because I reach the boarder of either the pad or my fingers reach), the object sticks (could I describe that in an understandeable way ?) in the place where it is (e.g. a folder on the way between A and B), but where I did not want it to be. Is there a solution to this ?

Thanks in advance and bye,

Peter

[15victorc]

I have the exact same issue and I have not found a solution yet. I have a 15 inch Macbook Pro Retina 11,3. Yosemite 10.10 is dual booted with linux mint. On my linux, I changed noveau to nvidia (346.35) cause nouveau only gave me 120 fps average on glxgears (it goes upto to 11000fps after changing to nvidia). Battery consumption seems to have gotten a lot worse on linux now. But unlike your issue, my brightness will not change even if I suspend the computer. The 100% brightness ability of Macbook pro is killing my eyes. I have tried 'pommed' which didn't work. Simply failed to launch even with the gtk.
I tried using smartdimmer.
$ smartdimmer -s 50
which came back with
setcard() failed!
None of the other smartdimmer options worked as well

Post a reply if anyone has found a solution.

Regards,
Victor

[15victorc]

Hey,

I fixed the issue on my Macbook Pro Retina running with nvidia-346 GeForce GT 750m . Anyone else using linux mint or ubuntu 14.04 on a retina may also be able to fix it using this method. Simply use this command in terminal:
sudo setpci -v -H1 -s 00:01.00 BRIDGE_CONTROL=0
Now test if the brightness controls work. If this worked for you, continue with the following steps. The command you type in terminal is temporary and will reset if you restart linux. So goto your /etc/rc.local and put setpci -v -H1 -s 00:01.00 BRIDGE_CONTROL=0 at the beginning of the document. this can be done with the following command on terminal:
gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local
type in your password and put the following into the top of the document.
setpci -v -H1 -s 00:01.00 BRIDGE_CONTROL=0
Save, quit and reboot to see if the brightness works.

Cheers