(I couldn’t find if I had posted this, so here’s the deal)
Getting Ubuntu to run side-by-side on my Z930 was a major hassle – to the point I had to call in assistance (Thanks, Piotr!!).
After that, I had it running, but the brightness keys did not work. Kind of silly – the screen was at full brightness, which is less than ideal for a laptop on battery…
Took a while to fix it. Below is what I can now reconstruct that we’ve done — this includes both the tips from http://www.linlap.com/toshiba_portege_z930 and this workaround. Both are on my laptop – I don’t know if one out of two would suffice…
Below, I’ve reproduced both in case one or the other goes offline.
Tips from LinLap.com
In /etc/default/grub, add acpi_backlight=vendor at the end to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Next, run update-grub (given all the problems with UEFI and having 3 bootmanagers on the system now, that’s a scary step for me).
After rebooting, this will remove the acpi_video0 from /sys/class/backlight/ leaving you just with intel_backlight and toshiba. Upon resuming with these settings the screen would be completely black with no means of making it brighter. To fix this one needs to create and add the following to /etc/pm/sleep.d/restore_brightness:
#!/bin/bash
case "$1" in
suspend|hibernate)
#do nothing
;;
resume|thaw)
echo 7 > /sys/class/backlight/toshiba/brightness
;;
*)
exit 1
;;
esac
exit 0
chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/restore_brightness
That’s it from LinLap.
Bug workaround
Create the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/80-backlight.conf as:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight" # use your backlight that works here
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
That’s the workaround. Both are on my system, and the brightness controls work.