intel-backlight

intel-backlight is a replacement utility tool for xbacklight to control screen brightness for laptops having an Intel graphic card.

This script is mainly created because of the xbacklight error:

No outputs have backlight property

for which nothing really seems to fix the issue following the steps described in here.

Install

To install intel-backlight, clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/riadhlaabidi/intel-backlight

This script uses the interface provided in /sys/class/backlight to write the power level of the backlight LEDs. In case of Intel graphic cards this directory will be named intel_backlight, inside it there are two main files max_brightness and brightness, which are used to write power level values.

For this to work, you need to create a group (video for example), if it doesn't exist already, and add your current user to it. This way the setup script will add a udev rule backlight.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d giving the group needed permissions to edit the brightness file on boot.

sudo groupadd video

# add current user to the group
sudo usermod -aG video $USER

Next, install the tool using setup.sh

sudo ./setup.sh

Note

You may need to logout/reboot in order for the changes in udev rules to take effect.

You can then verify it's working by running:

intel-backlight

Usage

There are 2 options to update brightness:

# increase brightness by x % 
intel-backlight -inc 20

# decrease brightness by x % 
intel-backlight -dec 20

Increasing and decreasing operations take a value between 0..100, if the actual brightness is at max (100%): any further increasing will not take effect. Same as for decreasing, if the actual brightness is at min (0%): any further decreasing will be ignored.