Rob Young

If you want a Linux distro that can more or less guarantee it’ll work with minimal fuss, most people would recommend Ubuntu. It’s generally very good at getting things right first time, has a very simple (no-involvement if you wish) installer and is a great starting point for anyone who’s new to Linux.

Installing it on my laptop was a breeze, and more or less everything worked straight off the bat. One thing that didn’t work for me was Gnome’s Brightness Applet – no big deal, but I find myself using it quite a lot to try and eke out more battery life.

The laptop in question is a Sony Vaio VGN-FE31H – which has an Nvidia Geforce Go 7400.

In order to get it working, you must install a package which allows the OS to use the hardware brightness control of the card. It’s called “smartdimmer”, and you need to install it using the gnome Synaptic Package Manager or the command line.

Once you’ve installed it, you can use the program on the command line by typing the following commands

smartdimmer -s <level> - to set the level of brightness from 1-21

smartdimmer -i - to increment the brightness by one level

smartdimmer -d - to decrement the brightness by one level

smartdimmer -g - to get the current brightness level

This sort of solves the problem, assuming you’re happy adjusting things via the command line. In my searching I came across someone who created a gnome applet to adjust your brightness, using the smartdimmer package in the background. It’s pretty hacky, and I’m fairly sure you end up installing a lot of unnecessary packages in order to get it to work, but until something better comes along I’m probably going to use it. The instructions to obtain and install it (at your own risk, it’s quite old) are on a post on the Ubuntu forums here.