Asus UL30A brightness keys on Linux

Asus UL30A is a lightweight, 13 inch, budget laptop with a pretty long battery life. It also has a pretty good compatibility with Linux: pretty much everything works out-of-the-box. The only things that need tweaking after a fresh Linux installation are the brightness controls.

To get the keys working, you need to make sure that Linux boots the kernel with the these ACPI settings:

acpi_osi= acpi_vendor=vendor

If you have Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint or any other Debian based distribution installed, all you need to do is follow these steps:

• Edit file /etc/default/grub
• Make sure that GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable includes the mentioned settings. For example:

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_osi= acpi_vendor=vendor"
  

• Run update-grub:

  # sudo update-grub