Comment 5 for bug 503577

I am going to write out a workaround for this bug, mostly for my own amusement, and possibly for a stray soul wanting to use Karmic on a Dell mini 10, and searching here in desperation. Apparently, Ubuntu devs have to much on their hands to look bugs, let alone fixing them. It's a little sad, but understandable, besides, the bug is probably not that important, after all, who doesn't have sunglasses these days. Obviously, wearing sunglasses would be a workaround in and by itself, but that's too obvious, and I wouldn't bother suggesting it, had it not come to mind right now. You know, stray thought. Anyway, before this turns into a novel, here comes the workaround.

Step one.
You have to add the following boot option: acpi_backlight=vendor. More info on how to do it can be found on ubuntuforums.org, specifically -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1313390&page=3&highlight=brightness.

Step two.
Now, you can adjust the default screen brightness, still ignored after step one, by adding the following line to /etc/rc.local:

echo 2 > /sys/class/backlight/compal-laptop/brightness

2 is my personal preference, but you can adjust it using any value from 0 to 7, where 7 = 100% brightness.