Getting the Brightness Control to work on Lenovo ThinkPad with Linux Mint 17 (x64) installed and with Nvidia Quadro K1000M on board

Posted on 2 mins read

I haven’t had much problems with getting the Brightness Control to work in Mint 16, but after installing v17 I had to struggle much more.

I honestly admit that I don’t know which of the following steps actually did the trick, nevertheless it works now :)

OK, I’m currently running Mint 17 x64 on Lenovo W530 with Nvidia Quadro K1000M and with Nvidia 331.38 installed. Display mode in BIOS is set to Discrete Mode.

Here’s a list of things I did:

  • I’ve updated the bios to latest available version (G5ET99WW (2.59)) Read my short tutorial on how to upgrade it from a USB pendrive
  • Generated a new xorg.conf using “NVIDIA X Server Settings -> X Server Display Configuration -> Save to X Configuration file”
  • Then added EnableBrightnessControl=1 to the device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "Quadro K1000M" Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1" EndSection
  • After rebooting, the only thing I could find in /sys/class/backlight was: thinkpad_screen
  • Then I tried to set the "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" in /etc/default/grub to: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor" or GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nox2apic acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor" but that didn’t work
  • Finally I set it to only: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nox2apic"
  • and after rebooting Brightness Control buttons (Fn+F8 & F9) started to work and in the /sys/class/backlight I found acpi_video0 instead of thinkpad_screen
ls -la /sys/class/backlight total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 10 10:14 acpi_video0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0/backlight/acpi_video0/

I hope this will help someone.

Pls drop some comments if it helped you!
Cheers,
Señor QA