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Adjust display brightness for Sony Vaio on Ubuntu

Submitted by radu on March 19, 2010 - 1:10am

Adjusting the display brightness for the Sony Vaio F series doesn't work by default on Ubuntu. I've done a little research about the issue and found some interesting things.

After loading and unloading the module, you get the following dmesg messages:

# rmmod sony_laptop
# modprobe sony_laptop debug=1
# dmesg | tail
[ 2976.867199] sony-laptop: method: name: SNFD, args 1
[ 2976.867204] sony-laptop: method: name: SNFE, args 1
[ 2976.867209] sony-laptop: method: name: SNFF, args 1
[ 2976.867218] sony-laptop: Doing SNC setup
[ 2976.879859] sony-laptop: Found rkfill handle: 0x0124
[ 2976.880855] sony-laptop: Radio devices, looking at 0x00
[ 2976.882935] sony-laptop: Radio devices, looking at 0x10
[ 2976.892519] input: Sony Vaio Keys as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0A08:00/device:01/SNY5001:00/input/input11
[ 2976.892599] input: Sony Vaio Jogdial as /devices/virtual/input/input12
[ 2976.892657] sony-laptop: brightness ignored, must be controlled by ACPI video driver

Now, when pressing the Fn keys, you get the following output:

# dmesg | tail
[10933.010324] sony-laptop: sony_nc_notify, event: 0x10
[10933.186300] sony-laptop: sony_nc_notify, event: 0x3b
[10933.736506] sony-laptop: sony_nc_notify, event: 0x11
[10933.891048] sony-laptop: sony_nc_notify, event: 0x3b

The most important message here is sony-laptop: brightness ignored, must be controlled by ACPI video driver. This tells us that the brightness must be handled by the nVidia video driver.

By default the brightness control is disabled in the nVidia driver. To enable it, you'll have to add the following line to the "Device" section of your xorg.conf:

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

After adding the line, just restart your X server. Everything will work fine, including the auto brightness dimming.

Comments

Thanks a lot! That's works perfectly for my VAIO F13Z1 (GeForce 425M, driver 256.53) on Ubuntu 10.10

Submitted by Bulat on November 22, 2010 - 12:55am

hey!
i have a sony VAIO- VPCEBN34EN. I recently installed Ubuntu in my laptop.The touch pad is not working on the Ubunt 10.4 thing + the Brightness cannot be controlled by the function keys. Please help me out. Event the sounds are disabled. Please tell me how to combat these problems. I am just a beginner and i don't understand how to use the coding systems displayed above.
Thanking you :)

Submitted by Rishi on April 11, 2011 - 11:10pm

Vaio VPCF11S1E brightness control is now working!! Thanks a lot, Kenjiru.

Submitted by Vim on May 20, 2011 - 6:30pm

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