Thinkpads Forum

Hello, I'm new here and not terribly bright!

I had to abandon my WINXP and plumped for Linux Mint 15. I am slowly (very slowly) coming to terms with it but the one issue which I cannot find an answer for is the screen brightness controls. As far as I can ascertain all the other Fn hotkeys work but not Fn + Home / End.

If anyone has an answer which an old chap well past his prime can understand I would indeed be eternally grateful

In case anyonew else has this problem and arrives at this thread I did eventually find an answer to the screen brightness problem on my IBM T43 purely by chance.

'Shut down' linux > start up linux > Fn + Home / End now work (for a while!) Why this should be so I have no idea but it does

As far as I can tell, the Fn+Home/End key combo works independently of the OS. On my ThinkPads, those keys will still control brightness even without a hard drive in the machine, during the boot splash or in the BIOS. And so far have never failed to work with Windows, or any of the dozens of Linux distros I've used.

The only odd thing I've noticed with most Linux Distros is when coming up out of suspend to RAM, they don't always return with the same brightness setting they went into suspend with. Probably because the Linux ACPI code is not tweaked specifically for ThinkPads like the factory installed software is. Some interesting reading on the subject here:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Thinkpad-acpi