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I have Xubuntu 16.04.1 LTS on a MacBook Air 11" 2014. The screen brightness buttons work flawlessly at boot, however if I suspend the computer and wake it up again anything bellow 80% brightness makes the screen so dark that there is no backlight at all and anything above 80% brightness sets the display at full brightness.

Egene
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  • Sound like a bug to me. Weird indeed. –  Jan 13 '17 at 10:58
  • Is there a solution or a workaround though ? – Egene Jan 13 '17 at 12:39
  • Check this answer, or the others in the post. Just type in after restoring session. –  Jan 13 '17 at 13:13
  • thank you @luchonacho, I tried that from what I now understand is that I can change my brightness with xrandr however if I use my power manager or xbacklight all brightness levels bellow 80% are 0% and all above 80% are 100%

    I am currently working on a bash script that will allow me to change my brightness with hotkeys using xrandr. I will be posting it here when it is done

     – Egene Jan 15 '17 at 22:12

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The problem was actually apple specific and is a known issue with Ubuntu on Macbooks.

Here is a resource on how to solve most of the problems with running Ubuntu on a macbook

A workaround for the backlight problem is also there:

Look at comment 78 of this bug report

Patrik Jakobsson wrote a kernel module that directly programs the backlight driver and it works!

If you don't want to compile by yourself, follow these steps.

  1. Install Build-Essentials and headers

    sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic

  2. Download mba6xbl-dkms_0.0.3_all.deb and install it with

    sudo dpkg -i mba6xbl-dkms_0.0.3_all.deb Note: Repeat this installation step each time you kernel gets updated.

  3. Load the module:

    sudo modprobe mba6x_bl
  4. Log out and log back in. It should load automatically on next boot

I do not recommend downloading the (mba6xbl-dkms_0.0.3_all.deb) because it personally did not work for me, try a newer version: mba6xbl-dkms_1.0.0_all.deb

Egene
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