When I'd do a fresh install starting with 12.04 (that's when I got the laptop I'm using now) the backlight wouldn't work but it was just a simple solution by changing the GRUB line to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor". So when the time came to update to 12.10 it happened again and that was the solution again, but not with 13.04.
When I'd do a fresh install starting with 12.04 (that's when I got the laptop I'm using now) the backlight wouldn't work but it was just a simple solution by changing the GRUB line to GRUB_CMDLINE_ LINUX_DEFAULT= "quiet splash acpi_backlight= vendor" . So when the time came to update to 12.10 it happened again and that was the solution again, but not with 13.04.