Scree corruption and system lockup on brightness change

[Mihai Bisog]

I own a Dell Inspiron N7010 laptop and ever since 11.04 the system has a chance to crash whenever I change the screen brightness be it by using the function keys or just the 'Brightness and Lock' function from the System Settings application.

The problem with this laptop is that its screen is too bright no matter where I am and usually I need around 1-3 attempts to successfully change the brightness so it gets annoying sometimes.

The laptop comes equipped with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series graphics card and I must say that I do indeed use the proprietary driver due to it's better power saving capabilities however the problem still persists with the open source one. The system behaves identically whether I use the driver from the Ubuntu repositories or the more recent version downloaded from AMD.

Another thing to note is that once the system has crashed I cannot change to a TTY and that the laptop FAN spins at maximum power. Also the Alt + SysRq + REISUB key combo is not working as well.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: xorg 1:7.6+12ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-26.41-generic 3.2.19
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-26-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Jul 13 20:40:47 2012
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: xorg
Symptom: display
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[agostinomaurotto (agostino-maurotto)]

Same here
crashes still persist on 12.04.1
adjusting the brightness via the hotkeys usually results in an unrecoverable crash