No Brightness on ASUS M50SV running Ubuntu 8.10

I figure the title pretty much sums it up, but I've installed 8.10 on my laptop (running Gnome), and the backlight is practically inoperative.

The brightness is fine throughout bios startup and when Ubuntu is loading (with the splashscreen and loading bar), but about halfway through loading, the brightness cuts back to a point where the screen is barely readable.

My brightness hotkeys don't work (though I expected that), and neither does the LCD Panel applet...

I've been searching around and haven't been able to find anything that works with my laptop.

Any help would be great, thanks in advance.

 

It's the asus acpi driver kicking in with a shell script. You can try:

sudo rmmod asus_laptop

sudo modprobe asus_laptop

That might get your brightness keys back. It works for some reason on the N10J.

 

Cheers, will do.

 

Eh, no go, the second line doesn't seem to do anything. Am I doing it right? The italic text is what I typed in.

sudo rmmod asus_laptop
dragunov21@dragunov21-laptop:~$ sudo modprobe asus_laptop
dragunov21@dragunov21-laptop:~$

Any other thoughts?

 

Maybe disable the light sensor?

Code:

sudo echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/asus_laptop/ls_switch

Edit: I searched around a bit, somebody has a pretty nice howto here that shows how to make it into a startup script:
http://seethisnowreadthis.com/2008/05/19/how-to-install-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron-on-the-asus-m50sv-a1/

 

I had the same exact problem, i worked it out by doing this
sudo chmod 666 /sys/devices/platform/asus-laptop/ls_switch
sudo echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/asus-laptop/ls_switch

(notice that asus-laptop has a dash and not and underscore and chmod 666 just makes the file accessible because before it was denying me access)

 

Just tried startup script, worked like a charm - ALLurGroceries, you're the best.

And thanks TMO, I appreciate the advice, I'll keep that command tucked away for future reference, I think.