Dell Studio Screen Brightness Control Problem in Ubuntu-Part 2

November 1, 2009 | By Naman Bagga | Filed in: Linux.

This post is Part 2 of the Dell Studio Screen Brightness Control Problem in Ubuntu. In that post, I mentioned how you can solve this issue by making an edit in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. But recently, I upgraded my bootlaoder to GRUB 2. Many people would eventually do so in the near future. As I’ve mentioned in that post, editing GRUB 2 files isn’t as straightforward as editing menu.lst.

Here’s a simple solution to get your Dell Studio brightness control buttons working if you are using GRUB 2-

1.Edit the GRUB 2 default options file by running the following in a terminal

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

2.Look for the line-

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”

and change it to-

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash noapic”

3.Now update GRUB by running-

sudo update-grub

4.Reboot your laptop. Your brightness buttons should work perfectly fine now.

Basically, you’ve made the same edit to the GRUB configuration file here too but the method to do it with GRUB 2 is slightly different.


7 comments on “Dell Studio Screen Brightness Control Problem in Ubuntu-Part 2

    • Nothing new in that respect. I’m using the proprietary FGLRX driver with compiz fusion disabled. No issues as such this way. But with desktop effects enabled, I often get issues with video playback. I haven’t tried Karmic yet so don’t know what’s in store in the future.

          • So far I’ve been using Windows 7, yes, but I’ll make the switch after comparing between OpenSuse and Ubuntu. I won’t remove Windows completely since I need to work in InDesign and Premiere Pro.

            Editing GRUB2 files is so cumbersome!

  1. I have a dell studio 1735. has anyone yet connected to the internet on karmic koala?There’s no way for me to scan for networks yet it lets me edit connections and so on, anyone know what the problem might be?

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