Lenovo S210T - Brightness Control Keys Under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

!!!Update!!! Upgrading to 14.04 LTS needs a small change to make the brightness control work perfectly. Read the update section below.

With the default Ubuntu 12.04 installation brightness control keys won't work. To fix this follow the steps below:

1. Open terminal (press Win key and type "terminal" and choose terminal)

2. Type the below code (you may be prompted to enter password)

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

3. In the grub file, edit the following line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

4. Make sure you have not done any other change by mistake as it will mess up your booting. Save and close the file.

5. Then execute below command

sudo update-grub

6. Restart your PC

Brightness Control working after ACPI change in GRUB command line

For me this fix works well. My model is the one with CDC processor, 2GB RAM,  500GB HDD. The brightness keys work most of the times, but in some sporadic cases, it won't. It happens very rarely (may be once in 20 boots). There may be some problem with drivers or something. I will update if I find out why.(see update) For Unity 3D/Unity 2D, the keyboard brightness control works flawlessly. For LXDE, the keys won't work. But alternatively you can use the xbacklight command. Follow the below steps after doing above changes.

1. To install xbacklight

sudo apt-get install xbacklight

2. To decrease brightness

xbacklight -dec 5

3. and to increase brightness

xbacklight -inc 7

The numbers can be anything But be extra careful as it may fully reduce brightness if you give large numbers.

Update: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (April 26th 2014)

I recently updated my laptop with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, after which the brightness control stopped working permanently. But it just needed a small change to work. Here it is.

1. Edit black list file for modprobe

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

2. Add the following lines to it

# Added to make brightness control work
blacklist ideapad_laptop

3. Reboot

That's it! Now brightness control works perfectly every times :)

Any other comments/feedbacks/improvements are welcome! Thanks for reading.

Site Suggestions for Techies

Here I will give few site suggestions for those who have interest in technology and computers. These are my personal suggestions as of now. The list may change/evolve with time :)

So I will give 2 tech news sites, 2 tech message feed sites, 2 tech forums, 2 tech fun stuff sites and 2 tech political sites.

1. Ars Technica

The site has a title that reminds us the famous Greek phrase "Ars longa, vita brevis" meaning, "Art is long, life is short". The site gives various RSS feeds covering various topics. The site has a good look and it is easy to get what you want.

URL: http://arstechnica.com/

2. Tech Crunch

This is one of the sites that fuels my tech quest on daily basis. Their way of covering things often resemble conventional media. But still, they live up to the name. New time-line like interface is cool.

URL: http://techcrunch.com/

3. Slashdot

This is one of the best tech blog feed site. The main attraction of the site is not the content but the comments by the user community. They are very informative with a touch of wit that is typical to nerds. The site's recent takeover by Dice Holdings and major change in interface (in beta mode) is receiving lot of negative criticism. Some people are moving to Soylent News, which is much like classic Slashdot. But still, Slashdot worth mention.

URL: http://slashdot.org/
For those who like classic version: http://soylentnews.org/

4. Hacker News

This is run by a geek from India, Mohit Kumar. The site reports news that others try to silence. The site's feed UI is very simple and easy to use. You can subscribe to its feed to get updates right on your browser too...

URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/

5. Stack Exchange

The largest democratic QA forum. It has lot of "sub-sites" which many of us assume separate sites. For example, Ask Ubuntu, Super User, Stack Overflow etc are from Stack Exchange family. So this is much like one point access for all your tech forums.

URL: http://stackexchange.com/

6. Linux Questions

This site specializes in addressing your questions about Linux. This site has a very active community that will help you readily with their technical expertise. They also send daily and weekly digests to your mail, so that you can get an outlook on what is going on.

URL: http://www.linuxquestions.org/

7. XKCD

The ultimate fun for all techies. If you show some of these cartoons to non-technical people, they will find them uninteresting at best and meaningless at worst. But for us, this site gives a relaxing fun filled pastime.

URL: http://xkcd.com/

8. The Joy of Tech

This is for those who don't like the monochromatic stick people of XKCD, The Joy of Tech provides colorful, life like cartoons but with good wit weaved together.

URL: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/

9. Richard Stallman's Political Notes

This is a daily update feed of political articles compiled by The Father of Free Software Movement, Dr. Richard Stallman himself. Though the site have frequent links about American politics, those links are equally valid for anyone living under globalized/privatized market. The site lacks any fancy interface. But the stuff matters a lot more.

URL: http://stallman.org/archives/polnotes.html

10. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

This site covers political activism and technological battles happening around the world. They are non-profit organization that fights legal battles against corporate monopolies and bending of law by the rich.

URL: https://www.eff.org/

Movie Review: Gravity

I watched Gravity movie last week. It was amazing with all those good visual effects, music and the actors had done a very good job. I can say compared to usual Hollywood movies that portray violence and sex, this is 100 times better and a must see for everyone.

Even people without English knowledge can understand. This will trigger interest about astronomy and science among children. Also, the movie has no unwanted scenes and very short, yet delivered the content what they wanted to deliver the audience.

But movies are not textbooks. So we should not assume whatever they show in that movie are 100% real. So there are many inaccuracies in the movie. Let me tell you some.
1. Russians never struck their own satellites with missiles, but Americans did in past.
2. Not all space-stations/satellites orbit in same altitude. So the chances for the events shown in the movie are very remote.
3. It is quite impossible to navigate large distances using MMUs. They were not in use for more than two decades. There is no need to separately say that fire-extinguishers can't do the job any better.
4. Where are the crew of Chinese space station?

These are all really minor errors or details overlooked explicitly to spice-up the movie. But the movie is so good. I have some friends who deny moon landing and say they are all made up videos. If they watch this movie, they will conclude men never traveled to space and everything about space is just computer generated effects! :)