Smaller brightness steps with the Asus N56VB and Ubuntu

Ubuntu on the laptop is definitely maturing. We’re way past “at least it boots” and now that survival is ensured, it is time for luxury illnesses. One of those on the Asus N56VB is handling of screen brightness which, for my taste, comes in too steep steps. Especially the minimum brightness is still too bright for nocturnals like me.

Thankfully that is not some hardware limitation, so we can get around it with a script:

#!/bin/bash

user=`whoami`

if [ "$user" != "root" ]; then
    echo Re-running as root
    sudo $0 $1
    exit 0
fi

command=$1
increment=1
B=/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video1/brightness
brightness=`cat $B`

case "$command" in
 up)
  brightness=`expr $brightness + $increment`
  echo $brightness > $B
 ;;
 down)
  brightness=`expr $brightness - $increment`
  echo $brightness > $B
 ;;
 *)
 echo supply up or down
 ;;
esac

You can bind a call to the script such as:

brightness.sh down

brightness.sh up

to a key shortcut and handle brightness changes with that script. If you feel the increment of 1 is too low, you can change it in the script too.

[2014.07.26]
Script is now available on github https://github.com/ggeorgovassilis/linuxscripts