Archives For November 30, 1999

How to Install Brightness Indicator in Ubuntu 14.10

Last updated: November 17, 2014

Indicator Brightness

The Fn brightness control doesn’t work on your Ubuntu Laptop? Try indicator-brightness, an applet on panel to set your screen brightness, which also supports keyboard shortcuts.

The indicator-brightness is inspired by the original Gnome brightness applet, it allows the Unity users to set screen brightness by using the indicator menu or the scroll wheel of your mouse over the indicator icon. With it, you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to control brightness with your keyboard.

Install Brightness Indicator Ubuntu 14.10:

It’s easy to install the applet though the developer doesn’t update the package for Ubuntu 14.10. And it works good on my laptop.

To install it, click the link below to go to the developer’s PPA package repository and download the .deb installer for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty.

Download indicator-brightness

Select download the “indicator-brightness_0.4~bzr11~ubuntu14.04.1_all.deb”. Once downloaded, double-click the package to open it with Ubuntu Software Center and finally click the “install” button.

Once installed, start the applet from the Unity Dash and enjoy!

To add custom shortcuts to control screen brightness:

Open System Settings and navigate to “Keyboard -> Shortcuts tab -> Custom Shortcuts”.

Click the plus sign to add two new shortcuts with:

  • name: Brightness up
    command:
    /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/indicator-brightness/indicator-brightness-adjust --up
  • name: Brightness down
    command:
    /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/indicator-brightness/indicator-brightness-adjust --down

Assign shortcut keys to them and done!

Want to control screen brightness through an indicator applet on panel? Well, you may want this app if your Fn key does not work properly.

Brightness indicator allows to change screen brightness by using the indicator menu or the scroll wheel of your mouse over the indicator icon. It’s inspired by the original Gnome brightness applet.

UPDATE: PPA has updated for Ubuntu 13.10, and Ubuntu 14.04. Run below commands one by one in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:indicator-brightness/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install indicator-brightness

The PPA does not update the packages for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy, but we can use the one for old releases. To get started installing this applet, follow the steps below:

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command below to download DEB for raring:

wget https://launchpad.net/~indicator-brightness/+archive/ppa/+files/indicator-brightness_0.4~bzr11~raring1_all.deb

2. Then install the deb as well as the dependencies:

sudo dpkg -i ndicator-brightness_0.4~bzr11~raring1_all.deb; sudo apt-get -f install

Alternatively, download the package from launchpad page. Install the required package python-appindicator from Ubuntu Software Center and then double-click to install the brightness indicator package.