I FINALLY got backlight working on my Q430 in Arch Linux. This solution SHOULD work for other Nvidia backlight laptops: that is those with Nvidia chipsets.

Download and install nvidia_bl for your distro. For Arch this is available in AUR. I'm not using the DKMS version.

Load the nvidia_bl module


If it doesn't return any errors you've got it, now you need to have it load at boot time. In arch this involves putting it in rc.conf in the modules=() section. I'm not sure on other distros.

Here's the catch:

on my system it listed TWO directories (three if you install samsung backlight stuffs)


Pressing the fn+up keys did pop up with an indicator, so I investigated:


pressed fn+down a few times



A HAH! The fn+brightness keys were outputting to the wrong damned hardware (probably the intel hardware). So I do the following



Now my fn+backlight keys WORK!

We need to blacklist those modules to keep them from loading. In arch you add a file to /etc/modprobe.d/ with the following lines in it


Though I'll probably just remove samsung-tools from my system as there don't appear to be any advantages to keeping it.

I hope this helps anyone else with the crazy freakin' nvidia backlight modules. Should depricate the "make a shell script" insanity.

Cheers.

After reverting several other backlight solutions I discovered the following was also necessary:

a modprobe file describing the backlight states of the nvidia_bl module. I made a file at /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia_bl.conf and wrote the following into it:

The only reason i have registered on this forum is to thank you! I had no freakin idea, which module created that @#%#% other directory, but blacklisting video module helped (i haven't installed samsung tools, so i didn't have the samsung_backlight)

Great post, saved me so much headache! Works fine! Samsung RV420 - nvidia GT520m /although it's paper claims to be an optimus, there is NO Intel card working in this one, just a single nvidia./