Intel HD3000 problem with brightness function keys - Dell N411z

Hard to say without access to the machine: Could be a regression in whatever bit of
unity handles those keys, or it's possible you need to boot your kernel with the "nomodeset"
option or similar added to the kernel command line.

Booting kernel with option- acpi_backlight=vendor

might fix it

I have tried all sorts of boot parameters... None of them works.

Just to be clear, the brightness adjustment works juts fine. I can adjust same via settings. It's the keys that do not work.

The strange thing is that the brightness buttons were working right out of the box till kernel 3.8. On kernels 3.11 and 3.13 they do not work. It's like they are dead...

It's a kernel thing? I don't know... I really wish they fix it.

please try

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep backlight

in terminal and post the output

And another

for interface in /sys/class/backlight/*; do echo $interface; cat $interface/max_brightness; done

The results:

mike@Linux-Dell:~$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep backlight
[    25.683] (--) intel(0): found backlight control interface acpi_video0 (type 'firmware')

mike@Linux-Dell:~$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness
16


 

I post them again:

mike@Linux-Dell:~$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep backlight
[    25.683] (--) intel(0): found backlight control interface acpi_video0 (type 'firmware')

mike@Linux-Dell:~$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness
16
mike@Linux-Dell:~$
 

There are two interfaces inside /sys/class/backlight:

mike@Linux-Dell:~$ echo /sys/class/backlight/*
/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0 /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight
 

and:

mike@Linux-Dell:~$ cat /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/max_brightness
4882
 

jeremyB first of all thanx for your email.

I tried your suggestions, the backlight changes just fine using the terminal commands for both cards (intel_backlight and acpi_video0). However, unfortunately the brightness function keys are dead.

I also created the 20-intel.conf, and again I tried both cards, rebooted but still the functions keys do not work.

As I said, I can adjust the brigthness just fine by using terminal or the slider in brightness settings.

The only problem is the brightness functions keys that are dead and do not even produce evdev results!

And these keys worked just fine right out of the box till ubuntu 13.04.

They do not work in 13.10 and 14.04.

If you read in my first post the link for the bug, they have narrowed it down to 3.11.0-0.2 as the start of the problem. The last working saucy kernel was 3.10.0-6.17.