Unsurprisingly, this problem remains in the latest ubuntu-x-swat nvidia driver, 280.13. There seems to be some kind of a fairly recent problem with nvidia backlight controls in the mactel community, with a few bugs filed (like #764195).
A comment mentioned some success adding the mactel PPA (ppa:mactel- support/ppa) and installing nvidia-bl-dkms: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics- drivers/+bug/764195/comments/11 Thought it might be worth a shot, so I tried this on my Thinkpad W510 with Quadro FX 880M (based on GT 330M apparently), but backlight behaviour didn't change with the nvidia blob, even after reboot. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X, which is subscribed to nvidia-graphics-drivers in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/562005 Title: Backlight controls of laptops with NVIDIA NVS and Quadro FX 880M GPUs no longer function while using proprietary drivers To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/562005/+subscriptions _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat Post to : ubuntu-x-swat@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp