System Brightness Control

[Kody Chavva]

Im having an issue with my Samsung N210 laptop that has the GMA3150 graphics controller (Atom N450 CPU). The problem is that after downloading recent Intel graphics drivers I can no longer change my screen brightness. This problem has been reported long ago elsewhere, at least in the sammynetbook.com forums. Following their advice, I uninstalled the driver and went back as far as version 8.14.10.1972 (the 64-bit version of the driver). The next driver available from Intel's site no longer allows me to change screen brightness, nor does anything newer.

Now, screen brightness on the N210 netbook is controlled by pressing Fn + Up and Fn + Down. It also requires a program from Samsung called "Easy Display Manager". Trying to adjust screen brightness using the latest Intel driver bring up a graphic produced by Easy Display Manager (EDM from now), but the brightness bars in said graphic don't move, nor does screen brightness change.

The problem is not just with Samsung's EDM program. There is a brightness slider in Windows 7 Power Options, and that also doesn't work after installing a driver later than .1972. With .1972 the Windows screen brightness slider works again, just like Samsung's EDM.

What is causing all of this and is there any way to use drivers less than a year old while still being able to control screen brightness via hotkeys? It's an important feature of any laptop. It just HAS TO WORK, don't you think?

The workaround suggested above won't help on my Samsung N150 Endi netbook running now under Windows 10 (which otherwise perfoms way better than Win7!) either. COULD INTEL PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS FLAWED GMA 3150 DRIVER AT LAST??? This really is shameful, considering that this bug has been reported for 4 years now.

I have fixed this issue on my Samsung N150 netbook about 20 minutes ago. Let me give you the particulars and then BOTH a link to the page I got this info from AND the steps I took to get it working in Windows 10. DTG: 15 August 2015 - 10:48 CDT (U.S.A.) (GMT-6)

This driver is the one Windows Update is pushing onto my netbook in Windows 10. Like all the other complaints above, it won't let you change the brightness of the backlight, so you drain your battery faster when not plugged in.

I cannot confirm which part of ANY of this is what worked, but I know that I did all instructions directly using regedt32.exe (I'm an experienced IT professional, by the way) and my Brightness controls now FULLY WORK after a restart.

This does work, indeed, thanks a lot! To speed up the procedure, however, I suggest to copy and paste these lines (which are also listed (w/o comments) in the link you mentioned) into a .reg file to be created using the new Windows 10 "Editor"--and then double-click on it, of course , before rebooting the system.

Now that it's morning, I've had some time to go through line-by-line those added registry keys. I can confirm that I can still control the brightness after removing all the "added" entries above. You only need to change the number value for the FeatureTestControl values to make it work.

Because I have read that sometimes the FFFF value might prevent the screen from even turning on after recovering from Standby ( -8/samsung-n150-plus-i-cant-control-bright/701.html Samsung n150 Plus, I can't control bright), I have changed the values to FFFE and I still have brightness control. I tested my Sleep mode just now and with the FFFE value in all positions, it does in fact come up properly after Sleep. I have Hibernate mode disabled for personal reasons. I don't much care for hibernate. Windows 10 boots up fast enough on its own for me to not care. I am running a Crucial MX100 250 GB SSD drive, after all.

I think I'm fully set with Windows 10 now. Everything works, all hot-keys work, all programs work properly (even the Samsung ones off the website). I'm pretty happy with Windows 10. It breaking my SLI on my desktop, however....that's another story. >.

Glad I could help you out. I'm trying to spread the word on how to fix this so people can upgrade to Windows 10 without having to worry about their battery life. Lord knows we can't trust Intel or Samsung to fix their driver packages when they're this old. I've already sent an e-mail to Samsung about this resolution, but I doubt I'll ever receive a reply or that they'll do anything.

You can even do like apastron said and make a registry batch file to do this. Make these three changes and then reboot your computer. You should have brightness control back if you have the Samsung Easy Display Manager software installed. You can get that app from Samsung's website for the N150 ( -N150-JA03US -N150-JA03US).

EDIT: Ok, so the Brightness keys work just fine, but something that still doesn't work are the Brightness sliders in Windows itself. Because of this, the brightness doesn't auto-change when you unplug the power supply and move to battery power and vice versa. I'll continue working on this issue until I have a solution.

So I'm still testing different values and registry settings, because even using FFFE, the Windows sliders still don't work. Yes, the FN keys change the brightness just fine. But I want to get the Windows sliders working so that when I plug/unplug the power cable, the brightness will automatically change to fit the change in power profile. To do this, I'll have to really study the entire registry log for that chip in Windows 7 so I can replicate it to Windows 10. I'll keep this thread updated with any progress I make.

I suppose this method is working for most of the people. But for me it doesn't seem to work. I tried to everything as you said. Maybe because i am using an external keyboard to my np150. The only way i can change the brightness is the slider inside the power options. I also tried to install the easy display manager version 3.0.3.11, it got installed but never run.

Intel does not verify all solutions, including but not limited to any file transfers that may appear in this community. Accordingly, Intel disclaims all express and implied warranties, including without limitation, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, as well as any warranty arising from course of performance, course of dealing, or usage in trade.

Brightness could be controlled by ACPI or by graphic driver. I suppose the one that controls your brightness is intel_backlight.However, you could easy find it out adding to your /etc/rc.local (before exit 0):

ACPI is a power interface management standard which is implemented inoperating system kernels. By default Linux kernel uses an inbuiltdriver for keyboard keys, which is often non compatible with somekeyboards.

Hence, we specify the option acpi_backlight=vendor which tells thekernel to take precedence of vendor driver over kernel driver. Theoption acpi_osi=linux tells the kernel to enable inbuilt ACPIworkarounds for Linux drivers; which can be the case if the devicedriver has issues for Linux architecture.

My computer is a Lenovo Legion Y740-15I with a nvidia GeForce RTX 2060.I have tried all solutions available but none worked. One day by chance when I installed tensorflow I had to install CUDA Toolkit 11.0 and his compiler.

Obviously, you should run this with the package of your current boot kernel. If you are unsure, run uname -r to get the kernel name. Moreover, package names after dpkg-reconfigure auto-complete in my bash, but your settings may vary.

Note that Nvidia drivers on MacBook Air 3,2 have a whole set of other, unrelated issues, some specifically related to brightness control. In particular, you need to add X-related device option settings EnableBrightnessControl=1 as per Brightness not working after installing NVIDIA driver. Also, MacBook Air 3,2 by default may fail to boot usable graphics altogether in Nvidia drivers, which is fixed by setting certain PCI-E registers in grub as per Proprietary NVidia drivers with EFI on Mac, to prevent overheating. Both were applied before on my machine and remained active after the upgrade, so not related.

I had much easier solution. Somehow unintentionally I've disabled "Handle display brightness keys" option in Xfce Power Manager. When pressing the brightness keys, the notification popup was displayed but the brightness bar wasn't moving. I took quite a while before I realized this.

Open the "Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer" app. Select the latest Kernel version which is at the very top of the list and click the Install button. As of this writing, version 5.15.1 is the latest. Restart the computer and the brightness keys work.

This worked for me. Ubuntu's own brightness control and keyboard brightness control work. Even when I turn the computer off and on, the setting does not change. This is real brightness control. When I lowered the brightness in third party programs, the screen became slightly bluish.

As a reference, my GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT is set to be that of the original one, i.e. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash". In addition, I installed the brightness-controller, but I'm not sure whether it helped me or not.

For a Lenovo Legion 5 with AMD Ryzen and Nvidia 1060Ti on Ubuntu 21.04 I tried multiple fixes listed by others in this thread (adding EnableBrightnessControl=1 in xorg.conf, updating kernel - yes, I was desperate, etc.), however that what helped was the following:

I have a similar problem on Ubuntu 22 (brightness slider doesn't change anything) and tried the proposed solution without success. So I tried to change acpi_backlight=video instead acpi_backlight=vendor (as other answer propose) and brightness slider start to work.

2 From all the options choose the latest one (the one that has the greater number) and you'll see that there are lots of the, some end in -server, others end in -open; what you have to do is choose the one that ends in nothing, for example, in the picture above I used the first one 'Using NVIDIA ... nvidia-driver-535 (propietary)' and then I clicked on apply changes, it made me restart and voila!

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