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I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga. It's been working flawlessly with Windows 8 - 9 hour battery life, awesome touchscreen, 4-second boot times.

So obviously I wanted to try Ubuntu 12.10. Well, I downloaded it and installed it - but I couldn't change the brightness!

These hotkeys work in Windows but not in Ubuntu - and none of the solutions others have proposed in other similar questions with Lenovo laptops have worked.

How can I make my brightness hotkeys work?

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Please tell us which solutions did you try. –  To Do Feb 27 '13 at 17:26
I found an answer! It shall be posted in 6 hours, as new users can't post answers for 8 hours after the questions's been asked. –  Owen Versteeg Feb 27 '13 at 19:08

3 Answers 3

up vote 6 down vote accepted

FOR 12.10

Okay, I found an answer in this page.

This solved my brightness problems permanently:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

You will find this line in the new opened window:


Change it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

Save and close the window and type this in the terminal:

sudo update-grub

and reboot.

FOR 13.04

  1. Add the acpi_backlight=vendor to your grub default command line
  2. Run the update-grub command
  3. blacklist the ideapad_laptop by adding "blacklist ideapad_laptop" to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file.
  4. Reboot
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I had precisely this problem on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon under Ubuntu 13.04 and the solution solved it. –  Marius Hofert Apr 9 '13 at 22:39
Now, on my T430 in Ubuntu 13.04, brightness gets adjusted properly but the brightness level indicator doesn't show the correct value. Anyway... –  krlmlr May 23 '13 at 13:38

I have another solution:



sudo update-grub

fixed it for me.

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Huh, I'll try this when I update to 13.04. Thanks! –  Owen Versteeg Apr 16 '13 at 14:12
This worked well for me on my ThinkPad T430, and fits in with the bug discussion on the kernel change which caused it. –  Matthew Walton May 5 '13 at 21:35

Another solution for my Lenovo G480:

  1. sudo nano /etc/default/grub

  2. Change the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="quiet splash" into:

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux"

  3. sudo update-grub

  4. Restart your Linux

This fix should work for another Lenovo models.

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protected by Community Dec 8 '13 at 12:02


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