First mint install, brightness controls aren't working

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tuxedotomson

First mint install, brightness controls aren't working

Post by tuxedotomson »

So I just installed mint for the first time... Finally a distro that runs good on my laptop!!!! But my brightness controls aren't working. The brightness meter goes up and down and the screen stays bright! Anybody have any help for a newbie? I installed amd catalyst to run on my intel graphics card, now I need my brightness to dim so I can really get a feel for my battery life. If anyone has any other tips to save battery life that would also help!!! thanks!!!!
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
tuxedotomson

Re: First mint install, brightness controls aren't working

Post by tuxedotomson »

bump for an answer
vinayr

Re: First mint install, brightness controls aren't working

Post by vinayr »

On my computer (Acer Aspire One 751h with the Intel GMA500 graphics card and Poulsbo driver as far as I understand) graphics were always a bit of an issue. Dell sorted it for Ubuntu as they had these cards in their computers, hence I made the shift from SuSE to Mint when I got this computer. With my old Mint edition (I don't recall which one) brightness was always low, which didn't bother me too much. With Mint 14 Nadia, brightness was always full, which did bother me. I eventually found this idea of a script called brightness.sh and rewrote it for my computer:

sudo sh -c "echo $1 > /sys/class/backlight/psb-bl/brightness"

So now if you you run ./brightness 20, your screen goes to 20%. Downside is that you always have to enter the password, which is a bit annoying but at least it saves your battery. Now that I've moved to Mint 16 Petra, I can finally use the brightness controls on my keyboard. So if you didn't have version 16, it may be worth trying the live cd or live usb drive.
squigish

Re: First mint install, brightness controls aren't working

Post by squigish »

You don't always have to enter your password when you run something with sudo, that's just the default. By editing the sudoers file, you can configure rules that allow specific users and/or commands to run as root without a password.

Be very careful when doing this. If done incorrectly, it could potentially be a security risk. Also, NEVER just open the sudoers file in a text editor and make changes. If you accidentially break something, you'll be unable to get root again, so you won't be able to fix it. Instead, use the command

Code: Select all

visudo
which is specifically designed for it.

I don't remember the details about how to do this, but this should give you an idea of what's possible, and how to search for it.
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