I'm sorry for trolling, but this seems to be blatant incompetence on nVidia's side. This bug has been known and reported for
at least a year - and it's still not been fixed.
I was pointed to nvclock in an earlier post, but that's really just a joke, isn't it? It works fine, yes, but I need to manually build an SVN version - and mind you, I still can't use the FN-Keys to adjust my brightness, nor will it do so automatically when I plug out the cord. And theres's another issue with nvclock: when I resume from suspend to memory, it ceases to work. Great. So my only option for adjusting my Laptop's backlight intensity is: switch to a virtual console, adjust, switch back - given my Laptop's uptime of more than seven days and ~20-40 suspend/resume cycles during that period of time.
It can't be that hard to fix nVidia! Even
if your architecture is so special that you would have to work around it to re-enable
an already present hardware functionality that works without the drivers, and would thus be broken by design, you should really be capable of doing this!
What's that? Customer support? I won't buy an nVidia-Laptop next time. Nor will I recommend it to anybody. ATI have released part of their specs and Intel are producing quality open source drivers. Their cards may not be as good, but if I wanted to play high end games, I would not be using Linux in the first place. If nVidia wants to keep their costumer base they shouldn't be treating them so badly