Cannot change brightness setting using function buttons or using the brightness control bar on HP laptop
After a lot of searching on the net, I tried the acpi_backlight=vendor
kernel option, and it worked! Not only for Ubuntu, but for other Linux OSes as well, so I am posting a guide.
Testing
Restart your system, and when you get to the GRUB menu, select your distribution (Ubuntu 13.04), don't press enter, but instead press e (to edit).
This will bring up your menu entry for editing.
Append to the line with starts with linux (and looks like linux /boot/linux3.9. ............
At the end of this line, leave a space and add acpi_backlight=vendor
so that it looks like
linux /boot/vmlinuz-310-x86_64 root=UUID=3161dd63-38c0-44bc-bc1e-34b692209b0b ro acpi_backlight=vendor
After this press F10 to boot.
Now try changing the brightness. It works for me.
Making this permanent
To make the change permanent we need to edit the GRUB configuration file
In a terminal type
sudo -H gedit /etc/default/grub
This will open the Grub configuration file.
In this file we have to edit the line
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_backlight=vendor"
After that save the file and run (type in the terminal)
sudo update-grub
to update the GRUB configuration file.
That's It! Now the brightness settings can be changed any time and will be persistent across reboots (at least for me!)
If anyone has queries please post them here.
Edit
Since Linux 3.16, the kernel by default uses the native backlight method, so the above steps could be redundant.
Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backlight#Kernel_command-line_options