Comment 15 for bug 212800

The Samsung R560 has the same problem, but I have a partial work-around.
If you press Fn+Up/Down, the brightness bar appears and starts flickering, but the brightness does not change. Instead the keyboard seems to lock up.
You can return the keyboard to normal by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F3, then Ctrl-Alt-F7
The Gnome brightness control applet also does not work.
However, you CAN adjust the brightness from the terminal, with the following commands:
For full brightness, type: smartdimmer -s 100
for low brightness, type: smartdimmer -s 30

I placed a set of script files with these commands on the desktop.
Now if only I could get the Fn+Up/Down keys to execute these commands...