When ever I restart (or logout and login) my laptop the LCD display brightness is set to the maximum value. Even if I set the brightness settings in the power to the value I need, they won’t be in effect when I restart the machine.

 Please note that rest of the blog article was edited on 5th of August 2012.

To solve this problem I wrote the following python script. First you need to add it to the startup applications list. The command to be given in the startup applications is “python /<path>/<to>/<script>/setBrightness.py < Brightness level>”.

(If you don’t know how to add this to start-up applications please refer http://linuxandfriends.com/2011/06/01/how-to-add-startup-programs-in-gnome-3/ )

An example would be python /home/ishan/.setBrightness/setBrightness.py 20 . If you do not specify a brightness level, the script will change the brightness level according to the time of the day. If it’s between 7am and 8pm, the script will make the brightness be set to 75.  If it’s between 8pm and 7am, the script will make the brightness be set to 20. You can edit these brightness levels by changing the variables day_level and night_level respectively.  

A special thank should go to Sergio Aguilar for adding this neat functionality of brightness changing according to the time of the day and changing the brightness using parameter passing.

If you are using Gnome 3 or Unity – 

Checkout the master branch from https://github.com/ishanthilina/setBrightness.

If you are using Gnome 2 –

Checkout the Gnome2 branch from https://github.com/ishanthilina/setBrightness.