@brad-figg: I did the tests you asked me.

I now ran dist-upgrade and booted with the Acer laptop that suffers from this 
issue. It turned out the old workaround in comment #4 stopped working in the 
new kernel 3.2.0-18, that is in /etc/default/grub line
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

I tried replacing it with
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi="
and
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux"

The second one was not good, as the Fn+Arrow right increased the
backlight and Arrow left vice versa, but on this keyboard the buttons
should go the other way around. However the former option responded to
the buttons the right way.

So if you are running a similar Acer laptop, this my recommended solution to 
get the Fn-buttons working is adding the line
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi="
to your /etc/default/grub and then run "sudo update-grub"

This is however only 50 % of the solution. When the computer starts you
probably want to see the screen by default without pressing Fn+Arrow
left first.

Therefore add to you /etc/rc.local file the line

echo "1" > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

(put it just above the exit 0 line)


The workaround in Comment #33 for bug #826386 suggets adding to rc.local the 
line "sudo setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=0", but I think my version is more verbose 
and robust to errors.

Somebody with the skills should write a patch that detects this laptop
make and inserts these two lines in grub and rc.local that fixes the
issue.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/910536

Title:
  Screen too dark, no backlight, unusable X

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